blob: 57b2459c306e9acfc1d08879ba0fd6a92d45d014 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +000015- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
16 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
17
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +000018- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
19 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
20 and cannot be strings).
21
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +000022- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
23 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
24 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
25 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
26
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +000027- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
28 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
29 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
30 Python itself.
31
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000032- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
33 the referenced object, if it has one.
34
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000035- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
36 the thread started at
37 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
38
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000039- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
40 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
41 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
42 placed on a list index.
43
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000044- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
45 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
46 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
47 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
48
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000049- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
50 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
51 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
52 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
53 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
54 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
55 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
56
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000057- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
58 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
59 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
60 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
61 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
62
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000063- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
64 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000065
66- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
67 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
68 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
69 #693195.)
70
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000071- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
72 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000073
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000074- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000075 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000076 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
77 interpreter executions, would fail.
78
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000079- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000080 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000081 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000082
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000083Extension modules
84-----------------
85
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +000086- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
87 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
88
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +000089- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
90 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
91 and Greg Chapman.)
92
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000093- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
94 recursively.
95
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000096- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000097 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
98 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
99 leaks.
100
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000101- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
102
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000103- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
104 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
105 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
106 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
107 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
108 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
109 #705836.
110
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000111- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
112 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
113
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000114- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
115 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
116 See SF bug #692416.
117
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000118- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
119 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
120
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000121- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
122 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
123 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000124
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000125- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
126 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
127 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
128 timeouts to work properly.
129
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000130Library
131-------
132
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000133- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
134 for querying platform dependent features.
135
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000136- netrc now allows Ascii punctuation characters in passwords.
137
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000138- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
139 pickle protocol versions.
140
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000141- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
142 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
143 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
144
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000145- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
146
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000147- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
148 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
149 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
150 modules.
151
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000152- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
153 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
154 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
155
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000156- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
157 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
158
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000159- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
160 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
161 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
162
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000163- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000164 MS Office extensions.
165
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000166- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
167 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
168
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000169- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
170 execution speed of expressions and statements.
171
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000172- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
173 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
174 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
175 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
176 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
177 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
178
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000179- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
180 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
181 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000182
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000183- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
184 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
185 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
186
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000187- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
188
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000189- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
190 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
191 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
192
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000193Tools/Demos
194-----------
195
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000196- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
197 See the module docstring for details.
198
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000199TBD
200
201Build
202-----
203
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000204- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
205 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000206
207C API
208-----
209
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000210- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
211
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000212- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
213 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
214 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
215
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000216- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
217 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
218 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
219 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
220 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000221
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000222- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000223 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
224
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000225- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
226 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
227 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000228
229New platforms
230-------------
231
232TBD
233
234Tests
235-----
236
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000237- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
238 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000239
240Windows
241-------
242
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000243- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
244 function.
245
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000246- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
247 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000248
249Mac
250---
251
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000252- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
253 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000254
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000255- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
256 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000257
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000258- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
259 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
260 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000261
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000262- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000263 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
264 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000265
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000266- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
267 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000268
269
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000270What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
271=================================
272
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000273*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000274
275Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000276-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000277
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000278- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
279 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
280 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
281
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000282- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
283 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
284 (SF patch #664376.)
285
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000286- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
287 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
288 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
289 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
290 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
291 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000292 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000293
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000294- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
295 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
296 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
297 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000298 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000299
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000300- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
301 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
302 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
303 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
304 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
305 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
306 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
307 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
308 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
309 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
310 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
311
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000312- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
313 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
314 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
315 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
316 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
317 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
318
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000319- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
320 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
321
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000322- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
323 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
324 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
325 case.)
326
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000327- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
328 passed as unicode strings.
329
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000330- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
331 See SF bug #683467.
332
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000333- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
334 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
335
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000336- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
337
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000338- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
339
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000340- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
341 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
342 arguments.
343
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000344- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
345 See SF bug #667147.
346
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000347- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000348 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000349 See SF bug #676155.
350
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000351- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000352 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000353 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
354 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
355 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
356 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
357 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
358 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000359
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000360Extension modules
361-----------------
362
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000363- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
364 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
365 tp_as_number pointer.
366
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000367- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
368 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
369 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
370 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
371 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
372
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000373- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
374
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000375- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
376
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000377- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000378 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000379 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
380 patch #678531.)
381
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000382- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
383 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
384
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000385- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
386 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
387
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000388- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
389
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000390- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
391 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
392 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
393
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000394- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
395
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000396- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
397 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
398
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000399- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000400
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000401- datetime changes:
402
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000403 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
404
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000405 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
406 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
407 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
408 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
409 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
410 now.
411
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000412 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000413 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
414 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000415
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000416 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000417 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000418 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
419 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
420 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
421 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000422
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000423 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
424 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
425 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000426 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
427
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000428 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
429 by a later example coded by Guido.
430
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000431 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000432 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
433 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
434 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000435 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
436 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
437
438 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
439 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
440 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
441 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
442 tzinfo subclass instance.
443
444 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
445 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
446 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
447 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
448 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
449 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
450 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
451 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000452
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000453 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
454 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
455 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
456 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
457 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000458 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
459
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000460 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000461
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000462 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
463 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
464 as a naive datetime object.
465
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000466 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
467 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
468 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
469
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000470 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
471 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
472 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
473 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
474 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
475 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
476 comparison.
477
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000478 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
479 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
480 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
481 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000482 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000483
484 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000485
486 and ::
487
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000488 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
489
490 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
491 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
492 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
493 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
494
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000495 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
496 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
497 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
498 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
499 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
500
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000501 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
502 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000503 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
504 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000505
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000506Library
507-------
508
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000509- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
510 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
511
512- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
513 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
514 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
515 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
516 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
517 See PEP 307 for details.
518
519- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
520 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
521
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000522- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
523 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000524 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000525 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
526 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000527 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000528
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000529- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
530 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
531
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000532- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
533 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
534 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
535
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000536- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
537
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000538- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
539 exception.
540
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000541- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
542 class.
543
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000544- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
545 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
546 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
547
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000548- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
549 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
550
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000551- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000552 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
553 See SF bug #659228.
554
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000555- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
556 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
557 See SF patch #651082.
558
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000559- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000560
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000561- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
562 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
563
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000564- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000565 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000566
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000567- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
568 DOS paths from other platforms.
569
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000570Tools/Demos
571-----------
572
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000573- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
574 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
575 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
576 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
577 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
578 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
579 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
580 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
581 example:
582
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000583 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
584 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000585
586 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
587
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000588
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000589Build
590-----
591
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000592- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
593 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
594 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000595 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
596
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000597 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
598
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000599- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
600 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
601 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
602 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
603 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
604 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
605 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
606 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
607 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
608
609- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
610 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
611 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
612 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
613
614- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
615 from the Tools/scripts directory.
616
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000617C API
618-----
619
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000620- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
621 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000622
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000623- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
624 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
625 tp_as_number pointer.
626
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000627- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
628 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
629 (SF #681367)
630
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000631- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
632 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
633 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
634 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000635
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000636Tests
637-----
638
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000639- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000640 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
641 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
642 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
643 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
644 pydoc.)
645
646- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
647
648- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000649
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000650Windows
651-------
652
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000653- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
654 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
655 time).
656
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000657- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
658 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
659
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000660- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
661 release without strong cryptography.
662
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000663- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000664 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000665
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000666- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
667 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
668
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000669Mac
670---
671
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000672- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
673 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000674
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000675- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
676 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
677 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000678
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000679- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
680 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000681
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000682- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
683 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
684 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
685 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000686
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000687- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000688 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
689 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
690 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000691
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000692
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000693What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000694=================================
695
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000696*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000697
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000698Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000699--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000700
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000701- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
702
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000703- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
704 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000705 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000706 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000707 a different meaning than before.
708
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000709- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000710 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000711 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000712
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000713- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000714 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000715 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000716
717- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
718 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
719 and deallocation.
720
721- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
722 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
723
724- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
725 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
726 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
727 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
728 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
729
730- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
731 now detected by the garbage collector.
732
733- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
734 [SF bug 519621]
735
736- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
737 identifier.
738
739- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
740 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
741 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
742 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
743 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
744 [SF bug 563060]
745
746- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
747 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
748 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
749 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
750 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
751
752- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
753 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
754 not called. [SF bug #537450]
755
756- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
757
758- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
759 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
760 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
761 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
762 state of the slots would be lost.)
763
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000764Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000765-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000766
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000767- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000768 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
769 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
770 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
771 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000772 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
773 Jython 2.1.
774
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000775- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000776 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000777 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
778 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
779 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
780 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
781 these, see PEP 302.
782
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000783- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
784 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
785 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
786
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000787- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
788 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
789 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
790
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000791- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
792 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
793 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
794
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000795- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
796 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
797 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
798 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
799 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
800 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
801 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
802 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
803 releases or implementations.
804
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000805- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000806 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
807 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000808
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000809- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
810 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
811
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000812- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
813 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
814 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
815
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000816- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
817 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
818
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000819- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
820 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000821 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
822 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000823
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000824- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
825 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
826 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
827 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
828 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
829
830 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
831 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
832 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
833 pattern.
834
835 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
836 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
837 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
838 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
839
840 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
841 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
842 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
843 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
844 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
845 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
846
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000847- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
848 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
849 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
850 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
851 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
852 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
853 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
854 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000855
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000856- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
857 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
858 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
859 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
860 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000861 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
862 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
863 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
864 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
865 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
866 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
867 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000868
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000869- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
870 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
871
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000872- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
873 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
874 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
875 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
876 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
877 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
878 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
879 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
880 to Zack Weinberg!
881
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000882- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
883 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
884 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
885 type. This has been fixed now.
886
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000887- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
888 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
889 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
890
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000891- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
892 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
893 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
894 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
895 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
896 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
897 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
898 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000899 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000900
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000901- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
902 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
903 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000904
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000905- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
906 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
907 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
908 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
909 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
910 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
911 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
912 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000913 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000914 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
915 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
916
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000917- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
918 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
919 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
920 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
921 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
922 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
923 this.)
924
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000925- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
926 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000927 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000928 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000929 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
930 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000931 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
932 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000933
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000934- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
935 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
936 currently running.
937
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000938- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
939 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
940 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
941 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
942
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000943- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
944 as directory names.
945
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000946- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
947 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
948
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000949- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
950 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
951
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000952- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000953 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
954 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000955
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000956- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
957 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
958 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
959 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
960 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
961
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000962- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
963 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
964 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
965 removed.
966
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000967- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
968 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
969 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
970
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000971- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
972 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
973 to __debug__.
974
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000975- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
976 string to the left with zeros. For example,
977 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
978
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000979- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
980 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
981 deprecated now.
982
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000983- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
984 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
985 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000986
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000987- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
988 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
989 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
990 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
991 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000992
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000993- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
994 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
995
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000996- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
997 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
998 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000999 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001000 is backward compatible.
1001
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001002- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1003 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1004 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1005 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1006 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1007
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001008- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1009 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1010 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1011 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1012 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1013 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001014
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001015- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1016 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1017
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001018- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1019 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1020
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001021- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1022 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1023 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1024 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1025 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1026
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001027- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1028 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1029 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1030
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001031- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001032 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1033
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001034- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1035 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1036 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001037
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001038- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1039 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1040
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001041- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1042 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1043 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1044
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001045- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1046
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001047Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001048-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001049
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001050- Added three operators to the operator module:
1051 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1052 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1053 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1054
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001055- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1056
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001057- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1058 archives.
1059
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001060- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1061 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1062 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1063
1064 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1065
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001066- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1067 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1068 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001069 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001070
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001071- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1072 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1073 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1074 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001075 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1076 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1077 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1078 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001079
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001080- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1081 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001082
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001083- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1084
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001085- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1086 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1087
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001088- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1089 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1090 supported.
1091
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001092- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1093
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001094- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1095 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001096
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001097- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1098 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1099
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001100- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1101
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001102- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1103 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1104
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001105- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1106 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1107 functions but callable type objects.
1108
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001109- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001110 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001111 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001112
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001113- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1114 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001115
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001116- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1117 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001118
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001119- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1120 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1121 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1122 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1123
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001124- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1125 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001126
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001127- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1128 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1129 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1130 and __imul__.
1131
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001132- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001133 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1134 is called.
1135
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001136- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1137 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1138 interpreter was compiled.
1139
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001140- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1141 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1142 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001143 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001144 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1145 1, not 2.
1146
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001147- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1148 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1149 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1150 limit.
1151
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001152- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1153 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1154 bug #623464.
1155
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001156- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1157 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1158 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1159 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1160
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001161Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001162-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001163
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001164- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1165
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001166- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1167 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1168 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1169 with Python 2.3a2.
1170
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001171- os.path exposes getctime.
1172
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001173- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001174 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001175 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001176 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001177 unit tests of floating point results.
1178
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001179- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1180 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1181 has been increased.
1182
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001183- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1184 executed.
1185
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001186- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1187 postinstallation script.
1188
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001189- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1190 test the current module.
1191
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001192- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001193 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1194 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1195 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1196 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1197
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001198- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001199 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001200 Ward's Optik package.
1201
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001202- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1203 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1204 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1205 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1206
1207- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1208 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001209 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001210
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001211- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1212 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1213 shelf are binary pickles.
1214
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001215- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1216 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1217
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001218- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1219 modules are iterators now.
1220
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001221- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1222 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1223 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1224 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1225 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1226 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001227
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001228- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1229 with their entity value.
1230
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001231- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1232
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001233- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1234 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001235
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001236- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1237 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001238 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001239
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001240- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1241 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1242 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1243 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1244 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1245 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1246 main():
1247
1248 import locale
1249 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1250
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001251- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1252 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1253
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001254- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1255 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1256 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1257 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1258 to the new standard.
1259
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001260- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1261 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1262 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1263 an extension to the database.
1264
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001265- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1266 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1267 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1268 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001269 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001270
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001271- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001272 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001273
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001274- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1275 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1276 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1277 bounded integers.
1278
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001279- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1280 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1281 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1282 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1283 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1284 in existence.
1285
1286 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1287 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1288 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1289 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1290 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1291 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1292
1293 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1294 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1295 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1296 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1297
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001298- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1299 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1300 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1301
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001302- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1303
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001304- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1305 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1306 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1307 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1308
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001309- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1310 argument.
1311
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001312- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1313 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1314 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1315 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1316 [SF patch 560794].
1317
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001318- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1319 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1320 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001321 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1322 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1323 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001324
1325- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1326 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001327
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001328- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1329 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1330 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1331 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001332
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001333- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1334 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1335 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1336 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1337 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1338
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001339- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001340
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001341- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1342
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001343- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1344 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1345 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1346 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1347 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1348 identical to None.
1349
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001350- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1351 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1352 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1353 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1354 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1355 results now.
1356
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001357- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1358 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1359
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001360- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1361 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1362 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1363 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1364 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1365 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1366 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1367 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1368
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001369- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1370
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001371- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1372 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1373
1374- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1375 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1376 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1377 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1378 and other systems.
1379
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001380- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1381 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1382 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1383 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 +00001384 work well with these.
1385
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001386- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1387
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001388- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001389 connections.
1390
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001391- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1392 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1393 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1394
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001395- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1396 sets
1397
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001398- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1399 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1400 name.
1401
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001402- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1403 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1404 passed in.
1405
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001406- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001407 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001408 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1409 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001410
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001411- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1412
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001413- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1414
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001415- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1416 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1417 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1418
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001419- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1420 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1421 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1422 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001423 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001424
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001425- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001426 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001427 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001428
1429- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1430 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1431 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1432
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001433- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001434 the value of its expression argument.
1435
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001436- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1437 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1438 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1439
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001440- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1441 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1442 skipstone browser was included.
1443
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001444- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1445 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1446
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001447Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001448-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001449
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001450- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1451 names in addition to accepting file names.
1452
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001453- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1454 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1455 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1456 still used and useful.)
1457
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001458- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1459 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1460 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1461 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001462
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001463- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1464 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1465 the generated binary.
1466
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001467Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001468-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001469
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001470- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1471
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001472- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1473 except in the hands of experts.
1474
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001475- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001476 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1477 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1478 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001479
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001480- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1481 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1482 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1483 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1484 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1485 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1486 builds.
1487
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001488- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1489 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1490 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1491 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1492 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1493 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1494 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1495 new type.
1496
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001497- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001498
1499 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1500 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1501 positive infinities.
1502
1503 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1504 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1505 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1506 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1507 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1508 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1509 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1510
1511 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1512
1513 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1514
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001515- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1516 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1517 size of the executable.
1518
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001519- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1520 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1521 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1522 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001523
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001524- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1525
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001526- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1527 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1528 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001529
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001530- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1531 well as Unix.
1532
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001533- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1534 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1535 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1536 modules in the README file for details.
1537
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001538C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001539-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001540
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001541- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1542 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001543 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001544 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001545 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001546
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001547- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1548 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1549 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1550 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1551 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1552 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001553 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001554 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1555 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1556 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1557 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1558 aligned.)
1559
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001560- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1561 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1562 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1563
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001564- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1565 level.
1566
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001567- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1568 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1569 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1570 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1571 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1572
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001573- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1574 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1575 code.
1576
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001577- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1578 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1579 adjusting for negative indices.
1580
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001581- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1582 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1583 object.
1584
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001585- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1586 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1587 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1588
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001589- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1590 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001591
1592- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1593
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001594- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1595 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1596 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1597 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1598
1599- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1600
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001601- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001602
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001603- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001604 without going through the buffer API.
1605
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001606- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001607
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001608- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1609 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1610 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1611 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1612
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001613- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1614 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1615
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001616- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001617 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1618
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001619New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001620-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001621
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001622- OpenVMS is now supported.
1623
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001624- AtheOS is now supported.
1625
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001626- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1627
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001628- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1629
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001630Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001631-----
1632
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001633- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1634 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1635 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001636
1637Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001638-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001639
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001640- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1641 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1642 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1643 bugs.
1644 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001645 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001646 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1647 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001648 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001649
1650- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001651 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001652
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001653- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1654 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1655
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001656- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1657 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001658 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001659 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1660
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001661- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1662 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1663 use files" uninstall option).
1664
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001665- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1666
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001667- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1668 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1669
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001670- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1671 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1672 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1673
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001674- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1675 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1676 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1677 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1678 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001679 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1680 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1681 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001682
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001683- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001684 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001685 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1686 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1687 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1688 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1689 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1690 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1691 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1692 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1693 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1694 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1695 work around.
1696
1697- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1698 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1699 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1700 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1701 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1702 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1703 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1704 specified with O_CREAT too).
1705
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001706Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001707----
1708
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001709- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001710
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001711- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1712 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1713 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1714
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001715- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1716 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1717 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1718
1719- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1720 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1721 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1722 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1723 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1724 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1725 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1726 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001727
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001728- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1729 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1730 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001731
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001732- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1733 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1734 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1735 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1736 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001737
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001738- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1739 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1740 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001741
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001742- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1743 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001744
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001745- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1746 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1747 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1748 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1749 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001750
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001751- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1752 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1753 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1754
1755- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1756 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1757 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001758
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001759- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1760 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1761 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1762 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001763 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001764
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001765- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1766 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001767
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001768- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1769 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001770
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001771- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001772 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001773 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1774 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001775
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001776
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001777What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001778===============================
1779
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001780*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1781
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001782Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001783--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001784
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001785- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1786 with a custom metaclass.
1787
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001788Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001789-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001790
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001791- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1792 are proxies.
1793
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001794Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001795-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001796
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001797- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1798 very short strings.
1799
1800- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1801 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1802 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1803 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1804 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1805
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001806Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001807-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001808
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001809- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1810 close or delete time).
1811
1812- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1813 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1814
1815- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1816
1817- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001818 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001819
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001820Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001821-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001822
1823Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001824-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001825
1826C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001827-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001828
1829New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001830-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001831
1832Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001833-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001834
1835Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001836-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001837
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001838- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1839
1840- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1841 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1842
1843- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1844 deleted at process exit time.
1845
1846- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1847 in backslash.
1848
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001849Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001850----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001851
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001852- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1853 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1854 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1855
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001856
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001857What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001858===========================
1859
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001860*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1861
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001862Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001863--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001864
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001865- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1866 been extensively updated. See
1867
1868 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1869
1870 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1871
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001872- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1873 deleted!
1874
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001875- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1876 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1877 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1878 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1879 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1880
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001881- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1882
1883 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1884 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1885
1886 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1887 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1888 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1889 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1890 supported anyway.
1891
1892 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1893 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1894
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001895- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1896 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1897 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1898 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1899 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001900
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001901- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1902 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1903 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1904
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001905Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001906-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001907
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001908- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1909 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1910 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1911 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1912 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1913 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001914 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1915 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1916 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1917 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001918
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001919- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1920 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1921 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1922
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001923Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001924-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001925
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001926- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1927
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001928Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001929-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001930
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001931- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1932 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1933 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1934 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1935 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1936 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1937
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001938- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1939
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001940- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1941
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001942- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1943
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001944- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1945 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1946 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1947
1948- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1949
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001950Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001951-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001952
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001953- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1954 off a search on Google.
1955
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001956Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001957-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001958
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001959- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1960 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1961 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1962 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1963 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1964 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1965 other platforms should do likewise.
1966
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001967- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1968 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1969 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1970
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001971C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001972-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001973
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001974- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1975 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1976 producing key-value pairs.
1977
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001978- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001979 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001980 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1981 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1982 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1983 previously went unchallenged.
1984
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001985New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001986-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001987
1988Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001989-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001990
1991Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001992-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001993
1994Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001995----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001996
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001997- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1998 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001999
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002000- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2001 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2002 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2003 home.
2004
2005
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002006What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002007===========================
2008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002009*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2010
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002011Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002012--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002013
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002014- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2015 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002016
2017 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002018 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002019
2020 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2021 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002022 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002023 This needs to be documented.
2024
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002025- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2026 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2027
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002028- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2029 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2030 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2031
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002032- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2033 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2034
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002035- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2036 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2037 class forbids it).
2038
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002039- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2040 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2041 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2042
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002043- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2044
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002045Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002046-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002047
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002048- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2049 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002050 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002051
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002052- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2053 (like 1 + '').
2054
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002055Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002056-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002057
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002058- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2059 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2060 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2061 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002062 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002063 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2064
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002065- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2066 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2067 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2068 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2069
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002070- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2071 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002072 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2073 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2074 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002075
2076- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2077 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002078
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002079- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2080 bytes on its input.
2081
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002082Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002083-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002084
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002085- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002086 convenience function.
2087
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002088- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2089 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2090 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002091 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2092 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2093 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2094 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2095 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2096 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002097
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002098- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2099 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2100 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2101 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2102
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002103- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2104 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2105 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2106
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002107- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2108 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2109 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2110 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2111
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002112- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2113 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002114 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002115 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2116 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2117 new -l and -e options.
2118
2119- statcache is now deprecated.
2120
2121- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2122 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002123 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002124 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2125 time properly taken into account.
2126
2127- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2128 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2129 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2130 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2131
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002132Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002133-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002134
2135Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002136-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002137
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002138- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2139 is built with libdb3 if available.
2140
2141- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2142
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002143C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002144-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002145
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002146- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2147 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2148 PySequence_Size().
2149
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002150- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2151
2152- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2153 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2154 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2155
2156- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2157 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2158
2159- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2160 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2161
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002162New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002163-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002164
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002165- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2166 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2167
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002168- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2169 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2170
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002171- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2172
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002173Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002174-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002175
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002176- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2177 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2178
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002179Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002180-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002181
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002182Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002183----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002184
2185- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2186 removed completely in the next release.
2187
2188- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2189 OSX.
2190
2191- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2192 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2193
2194- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2195
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002196
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002197What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002198===========================
2199
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002200*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2201
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002202Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002203--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002204
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002205- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002206 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002207 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002208 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2209 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002210 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2211 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002212 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2213 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002214
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002215- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2216 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2217
2218- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2219 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2220
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002221Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002222-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002223
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002224- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2225 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2226 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2227 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2228 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2229 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2230 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2231 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2232
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002233- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2234 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2235 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2236 example).
2237
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002238- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002239 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002240 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002241 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002242
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002243- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2244 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2245 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002246 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002247
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002248- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2249 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2250 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2251 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2252 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2253 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2254
2255 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2256
2257 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2258
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002259Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002260-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002261
2262- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2263
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002264- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2265
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002266- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2267 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002268
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002269- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2270 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2271 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2272 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2273 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2274 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002275 attributes.
2276
2277- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2278 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2279 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002280
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002281- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2282 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2283 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002284
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002285- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2286 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2287 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002288 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2289 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2290
2291- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2292 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002293
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002294Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002295-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002296
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002297- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2298 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2299
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002300- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2301 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2302 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2303 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2304
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002305- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2306 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2307 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2308 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2309
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002310 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2311 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2312 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2313 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2314 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2315 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2316 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2317 without losing information).
2318
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002319- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002320 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2321 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2322 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2323 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2324 module).
2325
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002326 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002327 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2328 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2329 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2330 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002331
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002332- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002333 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2334 encoding.
2335
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002336- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2337 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2338
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002339- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002340 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2341
2342- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2343 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2344 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2345 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2346
2347- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2348
2349- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2350 ON, and OFF.
2351
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002352- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2353 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2354
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002355Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002356-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002357
2358- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2359 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2360 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002361
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002362- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2363 been added: -X and -E.
2364
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002365Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002366-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002367
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002368- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2369 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2370
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002371C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002372-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002373
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002374- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2375 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2376 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2377 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2378 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2379
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002380- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2381 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2382 as long) arguments.
2383
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002384- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2385 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2386 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2387 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2388 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2389 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2390
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002391- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2392 input.
2393
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002394New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002395-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002396
2397Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002398-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002399
2400Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002401-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002402
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002403- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2404 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2405 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2406
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002407- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2408 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2409 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002410 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002411
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002412 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2413 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2414 import signal
2415 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002416
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002417 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002418 while 1:
2419 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002420 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002421 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2422 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2423 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2424 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002425
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002426
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002427What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2428===========================
2429
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002430*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2431
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002432Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002433--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002434
2435- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2436 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2437 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2438
2439- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2440 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2441 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2442 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2443 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2444 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2445 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002446
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002447- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002448 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002449 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2450 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2451 associate a docstring with a property.
2452
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002453- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2454 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2455 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2456 other built-in object types.
2457
2458- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2459 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2460 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2461 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2462 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2463
2464- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2465 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2466
2467- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2468 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002469 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002470 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2471 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2472 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2473 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2474 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2475
2476- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2477 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2478 class.
2479
2480- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2481 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2482 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2483 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2484
2485- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2486 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2487 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2488 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2489
2490- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2491 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2492
2493- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2494 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2495 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2496 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2497 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002498 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002499 with the same value as s.
2500
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002501- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2502
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002503Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002504----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002505
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002506- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2507
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002508- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2509 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2510 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2511 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2512 objects.
2513
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002514- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2515 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002516 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2517 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2518
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002519- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2520 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2521 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2522
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002523Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002524-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002525
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002526- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2527 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2528 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2529 by the instances.
2530
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002531- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2532 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2533 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2534
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002535- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2536 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2537 before the entire comparison is complete.
2538
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002539- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2540 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2541 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2542
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002543- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2544 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2545 getwriter().
2546
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002547- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2548 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2549
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002550- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002551 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2552 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2553
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002554- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2555 iterable object.
2556
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002557- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2558 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002559
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002560- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2561 authentication.
2562
2563- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2564 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002565
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002566- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002567 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2568 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2569 a sample driver.)
2570
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002571Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002572-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002573
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002574- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2575 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2576 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2577 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2578 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2579 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2580 kernel has large file support.
2581
2582- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2583 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2584 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2585 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2586 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2587
2588- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2589 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2590 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2591
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002592C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002593-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002594
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002595- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2596 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2597
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002598New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002599-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002600
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002601- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2602 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2603
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002604Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002605-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002606
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002607- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2608 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2609 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2610 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2611 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2612
2613- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2614 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2615 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2616 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2617
2618- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2619 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2620
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002621Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002622-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002623
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002624- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002625 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2626 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002627
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002628
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002629What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2630===========================
2631
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2633
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002634Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002635----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002636
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002637- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2638 big to represent as a C double.
2639
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002640- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2641 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2642 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2643 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2644 restriction).
2645
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002646- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2647 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2648 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2649 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2650 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2651
2652 >>> dir([])
2653 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2654 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2655 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2656 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2657 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2658 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2659 'reverse', 'sort']
2660
2661 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2662
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002663- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002664 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2665 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2666 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2667 OverflowError exception.
2668
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002669- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002670 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002671 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2672 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2673 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2674 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2675 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002676 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002677 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2678 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2679
2680 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2681 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2682 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2683 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002684
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002685- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002686 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2687 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2688 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2689 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2690 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2691 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2692 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2693 once it is created.
2694
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002695- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2696 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2697 (key, value) pairs.
2698
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002699- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002700 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2701 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2702
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002703- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2704 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2705 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2706 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2707 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002708
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002709- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002710 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2711 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2712
2713 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2714
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002715- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002716 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2717
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002718Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002719-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002720
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002721- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002722 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2723 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002724
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002725- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2726 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2727 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2728 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2729 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2730 in this area anymore).
2731
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002732- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2733 threading.Timer.
2734
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002735- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2736 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2737
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002738- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002739 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2740
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002741- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002742 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2743 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2744 converted to Python longs.
2745
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002746- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002747 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2748
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002749- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2750 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2751 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2752
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002753Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002754-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002755
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002756- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2757 division operators as per PEP 238.
2758
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002759Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002761
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002762- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2763 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2764 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2765 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2766
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002767C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002769
2770- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002771
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002772- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2773 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002774 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002775
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2777 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002778 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002779 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002780
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002781- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002782 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2783 module:
2784
2785 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002786
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002787 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2788 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002789
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002790 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2791 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002792
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002793 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2794
2795 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2796
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002797- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002798 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2799 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2800 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002801
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002802New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002803-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002804
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002805- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2806 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2807 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2808 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2809 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002810
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002811Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002813
2814Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002815-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002816
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002817- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2818 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2819 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2820 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002821 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2822 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2823 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2824 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2825 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002826
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002827- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002828 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2829
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002830
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002831What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2832===========================
2833
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002834*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2835
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002836Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002837-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002838
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002839- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2840 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2841
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002842- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2843 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2844 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002845
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002846- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2847 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2848 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2849 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002850
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002851- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2852
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002853- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002854
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002855Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002856-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002857
2858- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002859 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002860 the module docstring for details.
2861
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002862Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002863-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002864
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002865- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002866 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2867 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2868 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002869
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002870- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2871 Nick Mathewson.
2872
2873Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002874----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002875
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002876- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2877 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2878 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2879 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2880 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2881 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2882 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2883 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2884
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002885- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2886 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2887 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2888 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2889
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002890- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2891 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2892 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2893 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2894 come a long way).
2895
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002896- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2897 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2898 write filters for these warnings).
2899
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002900- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2901 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2902 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2903 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2904 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2905
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002906- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2907 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2908 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2909 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2910 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2911 older distribution.
2912
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002913Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002914-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002915
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002916- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2917 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002918 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002919
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002920- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2921 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2922 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2923
2924- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2925
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002926- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2927
2928- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2929
2930- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2931
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002932- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002933
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002934- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2935
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002936New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002938
2939C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002940-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002941
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002942- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2943 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2944 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2945 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2946 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2947 against buffer overruns.
2948
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002949- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002950 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2951 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002952 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2953 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2954 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2955
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002956- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2957 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2958 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2959 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2960 deprecated.
2961
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002962Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002963-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002964
2965- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2966 relevant is found.
2967
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002968
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002969What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002970===========================
2971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2973
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002974Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002975----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002976
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002977- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2978 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2979 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2980 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2981 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2982 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2983 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2984 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002985 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002986 repaired.
2987
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002988- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002989 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002990 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2991 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2992 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2993 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2994 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2995 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2996 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2997 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2998
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002999- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3000 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3001 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3002 leading BMO character).
3003
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003004- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3005 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3006 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3007
3008 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3009 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3010 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003011
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003012 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3013 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3014 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3015 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3016 for various simple to use conversions.
3017
3018 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3019 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3020
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003021 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3022 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3023 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3024 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3025 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3026 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3027 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3028 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3029 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3030 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3031 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3032 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3033 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3034 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3035 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003036
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003037- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3038 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3039 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003040 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003041 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003042
3043 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003044 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3045 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3046 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3047 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3048 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003049 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3050 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003051
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003052 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3053 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3054 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003055 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003056
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003057- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3058 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3059 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3060 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3061 floating arithmetic,
3062
3063 x = 9007199254740992.0
3064 print long(x)
3065
3066 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3067 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3068 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3069 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3070 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3071 functions are of good quality).
3072
3073 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3074 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3075 algorithms to break.
3076
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003077- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3078 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3079 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3080 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3081 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3082 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3083 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3084 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3085 order.
3086
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003087- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3088 operation along the most common code paths.
3089
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003090- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3091 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3092
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003093- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3094 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3095 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3096 {}.update(UserDict())
3097
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003098- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3099 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3100 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3101 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3102 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3103 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3104 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3105 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3106
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003107- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003108 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003110 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003111 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3112 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003113 join() method of strings
3114 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003115 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3116 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003117 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003118 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003119
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003120- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3121 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3122
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003123- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3124 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3125
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003126- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3127 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3128 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3129 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3130
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003131- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3132 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003133 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003134 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3135 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003136
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003137- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3138
3139
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003140Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003141-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003142
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003143- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003144 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003145 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3146 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3147
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003148- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3149 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3150
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003151- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3152 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3153 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3154 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3155
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003156- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3157 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3158 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3159
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003160- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3161
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003162- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3163
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003164- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3165 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3166 that are still imported into string.py).
3167
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003168- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3169
3170- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3171 Now it does.
3172
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003173- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3174
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003175- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3176 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3177 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3178 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3179 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003180 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3181 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003182
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003183- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3184 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3185 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3186 'help(object)'.
3187
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003188Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003190
3191- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003192 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003193 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3194 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3195
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003196- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003197 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3198 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003199
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003200C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003201-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003202
3203- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3204 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205
3206----
3207
3208**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**