blob: 07a9bc6b06232ed9e8e7e92ce89a8acbaffbd292 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +000015- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
16 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
17 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
18 Python itself.
19
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +000020- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
21 the referenced object, if it has one.
22
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +000023- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
24 the thread started at
25 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
26
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +000027- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
28 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
29 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
30 placed on a list index.
31
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +000032- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
33 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
34 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
35 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
36
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +000037- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
38 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
39 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
40 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
41 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
42 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
43 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
44
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000045- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
46 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
47 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
48 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
49 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
50
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000051- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
52 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000053
54- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
55 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
56 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
57 #693195.)
58
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000059- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
60 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000061
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000062- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000063 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000064 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
65 interpreter executions, would fail.
66
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000067- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000068 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000069 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000070
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000071Extension modules
72-----------------
73
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +000074- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
75 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
76
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +000077- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
78 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
79 and Greg Chapman.)
80
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +000081- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
82 recursively.
83
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +000084- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +000085 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
86 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
87 leaks.
88
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000089- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
90
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000091- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
92 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
93 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
94 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
95 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
96 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
97 #705836.
98
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000099- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
100 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
101
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000102- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
103 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
104 See SF bug #692416.
105
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000106- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
107 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
108
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000109- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
110 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
111 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000112
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000113- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
114 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
115 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
116 timeouts to work properly.
117
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000118Library
119-------
120
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000121- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
122 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
123 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
124 modules.
125
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000126- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
127 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
128 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
129
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000130- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
131 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
132
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000133- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
134 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
135 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
136
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000137- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000138 MS Office extensions.
139
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000140- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
141 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
142
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000143- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
144 execution speed of expressions and statements.
145
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000146- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
147 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
148 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
149 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
150 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
151 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
152
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000153- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
154 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
155 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000156
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000157- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
158 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
159 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
160
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000161- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
162
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000163- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
164 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
165 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
166
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000167Tools/Demos
168-----------
169
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000170- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
171 See the module docstring for details.
172
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000173TBD
174
175Build
176-----
177
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000178- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
179 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000180
181C API
182-----
183
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000184- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
185
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000186- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
187 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
188 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
189
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000190- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
191 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
192 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
193 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
194 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000195
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000196- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000197 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
198
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000199- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
200 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
201 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000202
203New platforms
204-------------
205
206TBD
207
208Tests
209-----
210
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000211- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
212 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000213
214Windows
215-------
216
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000217- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
218 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000219
220Mac
221---
222
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000223- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
224 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000225
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000226- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
227 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000228
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000229- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
230 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
231 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000232
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000233- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000234 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
235 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000236
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000237- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
238 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000239
240
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000241What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
242=================================
243
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000244*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000245
246Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000247-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000248
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000249- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
250 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
251 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
252
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000253- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
254 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
255 (SF patch #664376.)
256
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000257- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
258 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
259 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
260 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
261 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
262 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000263 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000264
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000265- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
266 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
267 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
268 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000269 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000270
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000271- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
272 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
273 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
274 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
275 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
276 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
277 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
278 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
279 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
280 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
281 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
282
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000283- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
284 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
285 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
286 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
287 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
288 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
289
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000290- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
291 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
292
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000293- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
294 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
295 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
296 case.)
297
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000298- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
299 passed as unicode strings.
300
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000301- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
302 See SF bug #683467.
303
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000304- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
305 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
306
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000307- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
308
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000309- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
310
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000311- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
312 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
313 arguments.
314
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000315- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
316 See SF bug #667147.
317
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000318- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000319 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000320 See SF bug #676155.
321
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000322- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000323 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000324 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
325 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
326 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
327 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
328 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
329 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000330
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000331Extension modules
332-----------------
333
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000334- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
335 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
336 tp_as_number pointer.
337
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000338- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
339 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
340 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
341 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
342 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
343
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000344- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
345
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000346- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
347
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000348- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000349 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000350 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
351 patch #678531.)
352
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000353- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
354 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
355
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000356- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
357 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
358
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000359- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
360
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000361- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
362 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
363 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
364
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000365- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
366
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000367- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
368 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
369
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000370- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000371
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000372- datetime changes:
373
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000374 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
375
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000376 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
377 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
378 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
379 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
380 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
381 now.
382
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000383 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000384 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
385 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000386
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000387 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000388 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000389 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
390 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
391 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
392 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000393
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000394 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
395 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
396 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000397 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
398
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000399 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
400 by a later example coded by Guido.
401
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000402 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000403 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
404 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
405 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000406 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
407 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
408
409 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
410 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
411 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
412 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
413 tzinfo subclass instance.
414
415 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
416 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
417 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
418 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
419 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
420 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
421 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
422 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000423
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000424 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
425 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
426 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
427 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
428 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000429 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
430
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000431 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000432
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000433 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
434 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
435 as a naive datetime object.
436
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000437 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
438 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
439 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
440
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000441 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
442 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
443 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
444 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
445 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
446 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
447 comparison.
448
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000449 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
450 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
451 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
452 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000453 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000454
455 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000456
457 and ::
458
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000459 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
460
461 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
462 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
463 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
464 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
465
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000466 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
467 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
468 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
469 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
470 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
471
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000472 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
473 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000474 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
475 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000476
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000477Library
478-------
479
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000480- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
481 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
482
483- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
484 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
485 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
486 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
487 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
488 See PEP 307 for details.
489
490- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
491 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
492
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000493- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
494 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000495 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000496 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
497 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000498 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000499
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000500- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
501 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
502
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000503- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
504 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
505 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
506
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000507- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
508
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000509- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
510 exception.
511
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000512- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
513 class.
514
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000515- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
516 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
517 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
518
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000519- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
520 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
521
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000522- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000523 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
524 See SF bug #659228.
525
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000526- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
527 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
528 See SF patch #651082.
529
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000530- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000531
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000532- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
533 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
534
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000535- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000536 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000537
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000538- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
539 DOS paths from other platforms.
540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000541Tools/Demos
542-----------
543
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000544- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
545 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
546 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
547 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
548 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
549 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
550 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
551 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
552 example:
553
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000554 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
555 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000556
557 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
558
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000559
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000560Build
561-----
562
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000563- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
564 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
565 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000566 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
567
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000568 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
569
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000570- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
571 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
572 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
573 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
574 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
575 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
576 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
577 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
578 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
579
580- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
581 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
582 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
583 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
584
585- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
586 from the Tools/scripts directory.
587
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000588C API
589-----
590
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000591- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
592 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000593
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000594- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
595 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
596 tp_as_number pointer.
597
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000598- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
599 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
600 (SF #681367)
601
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000602- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
603 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
604 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
605 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000606
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000607Tests
608-----
609
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000610- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000611 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
612 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
613 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
614 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
615 pydoc.)
616
617- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
618
619- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000620
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000621Windows
622-------
623
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000624- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
625 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
626 time).
627
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000628- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
629 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
630
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000631- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
632 release without strong cryptography.
633
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000634- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000635 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000636
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000637- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
638 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
639
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000640Mac
641---
642
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000643- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
644 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000645
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000646- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
647 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
648 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000649
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000650- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
651 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000652
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000653- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
654 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
655 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
656 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000657
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000658- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000659 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
660 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
661 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000662
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000663
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000664What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000665=================================
666
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000667*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000668
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000669Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000670--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000671
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000672- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
673
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000674- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
675 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000676 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000677 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000678 a different meaning than before.
679
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000680- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000681 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000682 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000683
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000684- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000685 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000686 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000687
688- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
689 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
690 and deallocation.
691
692- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
693 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
694
695- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
696 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
697 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
698 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
699 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
700
701- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
702 now detected by the garbage collector.
703
704- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
705 [SF bug 519621]
706
707- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
708 identifier.
709
710- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
711 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
712 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
713 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
714 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
715 [SF bug 563060]
716
717- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
718 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
719 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
720 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
721 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
722
723- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
724 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
725 not called. [SF bug #537450]
726
727- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
728
729- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
730 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
731 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
732 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
733 state of the slots would be lost.)
734
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000735Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000736-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000737
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000738- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000739 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
740 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
741 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
742 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000743 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
744 Jython 2.1.
745
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000746- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000747 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000748 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
749 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
750 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
751 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
752 these, see PEP 302.
753
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000754- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
755 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
756 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
757
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000758- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
759 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
760 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
761
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000762- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
763 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
764 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
765
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000766- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
767 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
768 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
769 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
770 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
771 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
772 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
773 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
774 releases or implementations.
775
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000776- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000777 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
778 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000779
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000780- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
781 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
782
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000783- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
784 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
785 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
786
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000787- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
788 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
789
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000790- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
791 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000792 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
793 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000794
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000795- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
796 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
797 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
798 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
799 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
800
801 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
802 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
803 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
804 pattern.
805
806 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
807 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
808 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
809 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
810
811 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
812 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
813 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
814 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
815 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
816 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
817
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000818- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
819 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
820 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
821 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
822 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
823 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
824 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
825 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000826
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000827- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
828 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
829 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
830 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
831 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000832 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
833 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
834 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
835 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
836 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
837 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
838 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000839
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000840- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
841 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
842
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000843- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
844 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
845 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
846 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
847 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
848 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
849 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
850 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
851 to Zack Weinberg!
852
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000853- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
854 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
855 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
856 type. This has been fixed now.
857
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000858- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
859 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
860 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
861
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000862- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
863 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
864 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
865 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
866 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
867 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
868 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
869 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000870 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000871
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000872- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
873 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
874 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000875
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000876- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
877 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
878 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
879 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
880 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
881 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
882 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
883 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000884 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000885 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
886 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
887
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000888- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
889 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
890 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
891 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
892 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
893 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
894 this.)
895
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000896- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
897 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000898 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000899 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000900 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
901 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000902 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
903 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000904
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000905- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
906 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
907 currently running.
908
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000909- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
910 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
911 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
912 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
913
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000914- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
915 as directory names.
916
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000917- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
918 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
919
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000920- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
921 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
922
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000923- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000924 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
925 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000926
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000927- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
928 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
929 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
930 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
931 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
932
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000933- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
934 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
935 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
936 removed.
937
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000938- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
939 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
940 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
941
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000942- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
943 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
944 to __debug__.
945
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000946- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
947 string to the left with zeros. For example,
948 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
949
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000950- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
951 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
952 deprecated now.
953
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000954- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
955 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
956 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000957
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000958- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
959 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
960 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
961 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
962 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000963
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000964- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
965 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
966
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000967- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
968 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
969 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000970 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000971 is backward compatible.
972
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000973- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
974 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
975 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
976 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
977 could access a pointer to freed memory.
978
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000979- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
980 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
981 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
982 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
983 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
984 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000985
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000986- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
987 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
988
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000989- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
990 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
991
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000992- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
993 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
994 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
995 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
996 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
997
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000998- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
999 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1000 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1001
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001002- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001003 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1004
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001005- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1006 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1007 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001008
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001009- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1010 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1011
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001012- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1013 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1014 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1015
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001016- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1017
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001018Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001019-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001020
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001021- Added three operators to the operator module:
1022 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1023 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1024 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1025
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001026- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1027
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001028- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1029 archives.
1030
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001031- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1032 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1033 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1034
1035 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1036
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001037- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1038 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1039 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001040 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001041
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001042- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1043 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1044 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1045 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001046 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1047 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1048 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1049 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001050
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001051- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1052 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001053
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001054- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1055
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001056- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1057 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1058
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001059- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1060 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1061 supported.
1062
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001063- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1064
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001065- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1066 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001067
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001068- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1069 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1070
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001071- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1072
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001073- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1074 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1075
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001076- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1077 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1078 functions but callable type objects.
1079
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001080- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001081 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001082 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001083
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001084- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1085 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001086
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001087- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1088 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001089
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001090- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1091 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1092 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1093 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1094
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001095- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1096 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001097
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001098- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1099 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1100 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1101 and __imul__.
1102
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001103- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001104 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1105 is called.
1106
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001107- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1108 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1109 interpreter was compiled.
1110
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001111- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1112 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1113 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001114 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001115 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1116 1, not 2.
1117
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001118- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1119 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1120 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1121 limit.
1122
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001123- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1124 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1125 bug #623464.
1126
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001127- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1128 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1129 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1130 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1131
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001132Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001133-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001134
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001135- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1136
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001137- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1138 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1139 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1140 with Python 2.3a2.
1141
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001142- os.path exposes getctime.
1143
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001144- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001145 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001146 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001147 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001148 unit tests of floating point results.
1149
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001150- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1151 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1152 has been increased.
1153
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001154- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1155 executed.
1156
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001157- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1158 postinstallation script.
1159
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001160- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1161 test the current module.
1162
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001163- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001164 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1165 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1166 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1167 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1168
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001169- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001170 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001171 Ward's Optik package.
1172
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001173- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1174 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1175 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1176 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1177
1178- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1179 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001180 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001181
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001182- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1183 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1184 shelf are binary pickles.
1185
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001186- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1187 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1188
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001189- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1190 modules are iterators now.
1191
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001192- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1193 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1194 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1195 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1196 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1197 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001198
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001199- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1200 with their entity value.
1201
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001202- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1203
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001204- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1205 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001206
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001207- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1208 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001209 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001210
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001211- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1212 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1213 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1214 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1215 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1216 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1217 main():
1218
1219 import locale
1220 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1221
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001222- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1223 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1224
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001225- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1226 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1227 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1228 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1229 to the new standard.
1230
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001231- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1232 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1233 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1234 an extension to the database.
1235
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001236- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1237 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1238 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1239 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001240 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001241
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001242- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001243 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001244
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001245- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1246 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1247 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1248 bounded integers.
1249
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001250- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1251 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1252 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1253 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1254 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1255 in existence.
1256
1257 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1258 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1259 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1260 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1261 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1262 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1263
1264 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1265 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1266 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1267 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1268
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001269- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1270 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1271 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1272
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001273- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1274
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001275- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1276 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1277 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1278 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1279
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001280- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1281 argument.
1282
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001283- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1284 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1285 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1286 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1287 [SF patch 560794].
1288
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001289- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1290 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1291 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001292 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1293 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1294 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001295
1296- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1297 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001298
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001299- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1300 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1301 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1302 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001303
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001304- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1305 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1306 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1307 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1308 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1309
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001310- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001311
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001312- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1313
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001314- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1315 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1316 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1317 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1318 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1319 identical to None.
1320
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001321- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1322 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1323 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1324 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1325 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1326 results now.
1327
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001328- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1329 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1330
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001331- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1332 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1333 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1334 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1335 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1336 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1337 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1338 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1339
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001340- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1341
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001342- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1343 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1344
1345- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1346 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1347 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1348 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1349 and other systems.
1350
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001351- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1352 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1353 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1354 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 +00001355 work well with these.
1356
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001357- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1358
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001359- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001360 connections.
1361
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001362- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1363 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1364 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1365
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001366- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1367 sets
1368
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001369- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1370 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1371 name.
1372
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001373- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1374 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1375 passed in.
1376
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001377- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001378 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001379 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1380 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001381
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001382- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1383
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001384- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1385
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001386- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1387 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1388 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1389
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001390- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1391 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1392 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1393 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001394 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001395
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001396- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001397 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001398 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001399
1400- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1401 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1402 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1403
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001404- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001405 the value of its expression argument.
1406
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001407- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1408 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1409 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1410
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001411- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1412 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1413 skipstone browser was included.
1414
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001415- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1416 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1417
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001418Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001419-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001420
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001421- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1422 names in addition to accepting file names.
1423
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001424- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1425 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1426 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1427 still used and useful.)
1428
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001429- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1430 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1431 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1432 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001433
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001434- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1435 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1436 the generated binary.
1437
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001438Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001439-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001440
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001441- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1442
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001443- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1444 except in the hands of experts.
1445
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001446- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001447 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1448 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1449 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001450
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001451- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1452 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1453 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1454 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1455 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1456 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1457 builds.
1458
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001459- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1460 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1461 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1462 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1463 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1464 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1465 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1466 new type.
1467
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001468- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001469
1470 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1471 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1472 positive infinities.
1473
1474 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1475 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1476 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1477 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1478 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1479 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1480 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1481
1482 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1483
1484 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1485
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001486- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1487 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1488 size of the executable.
1489
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001490- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1491 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1492 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1493 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001494
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001495- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1496
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001497- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1498 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1499 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001500
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001501- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1502 well as Unix.
1503
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001504- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1505 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1506 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1507 modules in the README file for details.
1508
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001509C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001510-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001511
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001512- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1513 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001514 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001515 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001516 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001517
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001518- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1519 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1520 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1521 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1522 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1523 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001524 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001525 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1526 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1527 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1528 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1529 aligned.)
1530
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001531- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1532 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1533 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1534
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001535- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1536 level.
1537
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001538- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1539 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1540 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1541 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1542 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1543
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001544- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1545 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1546 code.
1547
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001548- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1549 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1550 adjusting for negative indices.
1551
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001552- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1553 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1554 object.
1555
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001556- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1557 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1558 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1559
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001560- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1561 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001562
1563- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1564
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001565- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1566 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1567 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1568 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1569
1570- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1571
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001572- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001573
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001574- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001575 without going through the buffer API.
1576
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001577- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001578
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001579- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1580 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1581 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1582 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1583
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001584- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1585 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1586
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001587- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001588 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1589
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001590New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001591-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001592
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001593- OpenVMS is now supported.
1594
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001595- AtheOS is now supported.
1596
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001597- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1598
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001599- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1600
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001601Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001602-----
1603
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001604- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1605 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1606 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001607
1608Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001609-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001610
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001611- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1612 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1613 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1614 bugs.
1615 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001616 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001617 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1618 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001619 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001620
1621- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001622 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001623
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001624- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1625 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1626
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001627- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1628 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001629 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001630 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1631
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001632- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1633 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1634 use files" uninstall option).
1635
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001636- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1637
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001638- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1639 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1640
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001641- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1642 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1643 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1644
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001645- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1646 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1647 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1648 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1649 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001650 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1651 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1652 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001653
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001654- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001655 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001656 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1657 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1658 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1659 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1660 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1661 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1662 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1663 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1664 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1665 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1666 work around.
1667
1668- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1669 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1670 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1671 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1672 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1673 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1674 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1675 specified with O_CREAT too).
1676
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001677Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001678----
1679
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001680- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001681
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001682- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1683 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1684 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1685
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001686- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1687 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1688 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1689
1690- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1691 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1692 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1693 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1694 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1695 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1696 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1697 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001698
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001699- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1700 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1701 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001702
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001703- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1704 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1705 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1706 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1707 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001708
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001709- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1710 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1711 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001712
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001713- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1714 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001715
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001716- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1717 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1718 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1719 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1720 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001721
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001722- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1723 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1724 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1725
1726- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1727 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1728 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001729
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001730- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1731 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1732 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1733 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001734 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001735
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001736- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1737 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001738
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001739- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1740 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001741
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001742- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001743 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001744 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1745 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001746
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001747
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001748What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001749===============================
1750
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001751*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1752
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001753Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001754--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001755
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001756- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1757 with a custom metaclass.
1758
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001759Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001760-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001761
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001762- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1763 are proxies.
1764
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001765Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001766-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001767
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001768- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1769 very short strings.
1770
1771- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1772 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1773 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1774 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1775 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1776
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001777Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001778-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001779
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001780- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1781 close or delete time).
1782
1783- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1784 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1785
1786- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1787
1788- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001789 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001790
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001791Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001792-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001793
1794Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001795-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001796
1797C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001798-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001799
1800New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001801-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001802
1803Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001804-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001805
1806Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001807-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001808
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001809- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1810
1811- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1812 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1813
1814- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1815 deleted at process exit time.
1816
1817- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1818 in backslash.
1819
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001820Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001821----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001822
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001823- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1824 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1825 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1826
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001827
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001828What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001829===========================
1830
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001831*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1832
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001833Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001834--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001835
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001836- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1837 been extensively updated. See
1838
1839 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1840
1841 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1842
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001843- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1844 deleted!
1845
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001846- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1847 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1848 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1849 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1850 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1851
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001852- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1853
1854 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1855 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1856
1857 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1858 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1859 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1860 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1861 supported anyway.
1862
1863 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1864 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1865
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001866- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1867 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1868 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1869 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1870 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001871
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001872- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1873 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1874 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1875
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001876Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001877-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001878
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001879- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1880 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1881 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1882 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1883 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1884 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001885 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1886 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1887 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1888 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001889
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001890- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1891 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1892 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1893
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001894Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001895-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001896
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001897- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1898
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001899Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001900-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001901
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001902- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1903 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1904 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1905 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1906 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1907 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1908
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001909- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1910
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001911- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1912
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001913- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1914
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001915- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1916 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1917 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1918
1919- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1920
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001921Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001922-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001923
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001924- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1925 off a search on Google.
1926
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001927Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001928-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001929
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001930- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1931 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1932 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1933 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1934 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1935 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1936 other platforms should do likewise.
1937
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001938- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1939 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1940 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1941
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001942C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001943-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001944
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001945- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1946 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1947 producing key-value pairs.
1948
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001949- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001950 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001951 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1952 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1953 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1954 previously went unchallenged.
1955
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001956New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001957-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001958
1959Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001960-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001961
1962Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001963-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001964
1965Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001966----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001967
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001968- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1969 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001970
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001971- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1972 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1973 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1974 home.
1975
1976
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001977What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001978===========================
1979
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001980*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1981
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001982Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001983--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001984
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001985- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1986 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001987
1988 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001989 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001990
1991 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1992 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001993 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001994 This needs to be documented.
1995
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001996- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1997 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1998
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001999- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2000 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2001 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2002
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002003- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2004 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2005
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002006- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2007 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2008 class forbids it).
2009
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002010- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2011 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2012 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2013
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002014- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2015
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002016Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002017-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002018
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002019- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2020 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002021 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002022
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002023- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2024 (like 1 + '').
2025
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002026Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002027-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002028
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002029- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2030 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2031 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2032 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002033 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002034 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2035
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002036- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2037 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2038 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2039 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2040
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002041- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2042 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002043 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2044 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2045 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002046
2047- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2048 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002049
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002050- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2051 bytes on its input.
2052
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002053Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002054-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002055
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002056- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002057 convenience function.
2058
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002059- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2060 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2061 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002062 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2063 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2064 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2065 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2066 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2067 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002068
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002069- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2070 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2071 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2072 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2073
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002074- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2075 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2076 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2077
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002078- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2079 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2080 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2081 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2082
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002083- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2084 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002085 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002086 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2087 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2088 new -l and -e options.
2089
2090- statcache is now deprecated.
2091
2092- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2093 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002094 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002095 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2096 time properly taken into account.
2097
2098- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2099 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2100 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2101 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2102
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002103Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002104-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002105
2106Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002107-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002108
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002109- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2110 is built with libdb3 if available.
2111
2112- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2113
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002114C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002115-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002116
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002117- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2118 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2119 PySequence_Size().
2120
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002121- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2122
2123- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2124 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2125 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2126
2127- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2128 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2129
2130- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2131 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2132
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002133New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002134-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002135
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002136- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2137 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2138
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002139- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2140 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2141
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002142- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2143
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002144Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002145-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002146
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002147- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2148 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2149
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002150Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002151-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002152
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002153Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002154----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002155
2156- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2157 removed completely in the next release.
2158
2159- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2160 OSX.
2161
2162- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2163 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2164
2165- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2166
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002167
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002168What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002169===========================
2170
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002171*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2172
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002173Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002174--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002175
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002176- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002177 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002178 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002179 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2180 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002181 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2182 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002183 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2184 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002185
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002186- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2187 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2188
2189- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2190 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2191
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002192Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002193-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002194
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002195- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2196 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2197 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2198 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2199 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2200 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2201 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2202 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2203
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002204- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2205 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2206 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2207 example).
2208
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002209- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002210 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002211 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002212 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002213
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002214- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2215 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2216 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002217 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002218
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002219- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2220 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2221 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2222 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2223 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2224 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2225
2226 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2227
2228 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2229
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002230Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002231-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002232
2233- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2234
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002235- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2236
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002237- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2238 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002239
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002240- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2241 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2242 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2243 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2244 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2245 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002246 attributes.
2247
2248- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2249 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2250 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002251
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002252- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2253 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2254 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002255
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002256- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2257 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2258 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002259 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2260 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2261
2262- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2263 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002264
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002265Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002266-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002267
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002268- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2269 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2270
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002271- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2272 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2273 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2274 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2275
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002276- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2277 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2278 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2279 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2280
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002281 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2282 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2283 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2284 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2285 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2286 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2287 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2288 without losing information).
2289
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002290- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002291 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2292 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2293 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2294 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2295 module).
2296
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002297 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002298 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2299 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2300 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2301 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002302
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002303- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002304 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2305 encoding.
2306
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002307- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2308 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2309
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002310- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002311 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2312
2313- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2314 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2315 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2316 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2317
2318- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2319
2320- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2321 ON, and OFF.
2322
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002323- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2324 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2325
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002326Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002327-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002328
2329- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2330 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2331 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002332
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002333- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2334 been added: -X and -E.
2335
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002336Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002337-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002338
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002339- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2340 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2341
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002342C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002343-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002344
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002345- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2346 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2347 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2348 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2349 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2350
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002351- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2352 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2353 as long) arguments.
2354
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002355- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2356 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2357 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2358 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2359 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2360 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2361
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002362- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2363 input.
2364
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002365New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002366-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002367
2368Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002369-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002370
2371Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002372-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002373
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002374- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2375 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2376 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2377
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002378- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2379 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2380 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002381 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002382
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002383 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2384 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2385 import signal
2386 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002387
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002388 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002389 while 1:
2390 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002391 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002392 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2393 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2394 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2395 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002396
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002397
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002398What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2399===========================
2400
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002401*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2402
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002403Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002404--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002405
2406- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2407 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2408 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2409
2410- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2411 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2412 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2413 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2414 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2415 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2416 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002417
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002418- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002419 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002420 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2421 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2422 associate a docstring with a property.
2423
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002424- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2425 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2426 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2427 other built-in object types.
2428
2429- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2430 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2431 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2432 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2433 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2434
2435- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2436 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2437
2438- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2439 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002440 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002441 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2442 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2443 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2444 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2445 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2446
2447- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2448 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2449 class.
2450
2451- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2452 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2453 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2454 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2455
2456- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2457 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2458 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2459 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2460
2461- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2462 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2463
2464- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2465 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2466 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2467 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2468 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002469 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002470 with the same value as s.
2471
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002472- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2473
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002474Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002475----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002476
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002477- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2478
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002479- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2480 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2481 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2482 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2483 objects.
2484
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002485- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2486 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002487 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2488 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2489
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002490- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2491 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2492 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2493
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002494Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002495-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002496
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002497- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2498 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2499 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2500 by the instances.
2501
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002502- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2503 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2504 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2505
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002506- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2507 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2508 before the entire comparison is complete.
2509
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002510- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2511 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2512 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2513
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002514- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2515 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2516 getwriter().
2517
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002518- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2519 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2520
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002521- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002522 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2523 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2524
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002525- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2526 iterable object.
2527
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002528- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2529 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002530
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002531- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2532 authentication.
2533
2534- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2535 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002536
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002537- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002538 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2539 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2540 a sample driver.)
2541
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002542Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002543-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002544
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002545- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2546 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2547 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2548 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2549 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2550 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2551 kernel has large file support.
2552
2553- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2554 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2555 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2556 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2557 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2558
2559- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2560 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2561 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2562
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002563C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002564-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002565
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002566- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2567 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2568
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002569New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002570-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002571
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002572- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2573 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2574
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002575Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002576-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002577
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002578- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2579 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2580 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2581 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2582 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2583
2584- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2585 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2586 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2587 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2588
2589- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2590 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2591
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002592Windows
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- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002596 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2597 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002598
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002599
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002600What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2601===========================
2602
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002603*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2604
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002605Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002606----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002607
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002608- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2609 big to represent as a C double.
2610
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002611- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2612 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2613 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2614 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2615 restriction).
2616
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002617- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2618 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2619 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2620 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2621 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2622
2623 >>> dir([])
2624 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2625 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2626 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2627 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2628 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2629 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2630 'reverse', 'sort']
2631
2632 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2633
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002634- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002635 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2636 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2637 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2638 OverflowError exception.
2639
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002640- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002641 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002642 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2643 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2644 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2645 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2646 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002647 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2649 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2650
2651 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2652 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2653 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2654 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002655
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002656- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002657 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2658 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2659 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2660 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2661 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2662 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2663 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2664 once it is created.
2665
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002666- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2667 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2668 (key, value) pairs.
2669
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002670- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002671 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2672 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2673
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002674- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2675 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2676 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2677 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2678 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002679
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002680- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002681 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2682 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2683
2684 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2685
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002686- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002687 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2688
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002689Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002690-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002691
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002692- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002693 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2694 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002695
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002696- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2697 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2698 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2699 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2700 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2701 in this area anymore).
2702
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002703- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2704 threading.Timer.
2705
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002706- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2707 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2708
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002709- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002710 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2711
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002712- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002713 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2714 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2715 converted to Python longs.
2716
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002717- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002718 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2719
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002720- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2721 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2722 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2723
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002724Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002725-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002726
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002727- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2728 division operators as per PEP 238.
2729
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002730Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002731-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002732
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002733- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2734 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2735 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2736 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2737
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002738C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002739-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002740
2741- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002742
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002743- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2744 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002745 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002746
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002747 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2748 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002749 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002750 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002751
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002752- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002753 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2754 module:
2755
2756 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002757
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002758 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2759 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002760
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002761 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2762 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002763
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002764 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2765
2766 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2767
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002768- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002769 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2770 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2771 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002772
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002773New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002774-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002775
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002776- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2777 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2778 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2779 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2780 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002781
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002782Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002783-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002784
2785Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002787
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002788- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2789 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2790 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2791 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002792 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2793 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2794 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2795 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2796 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002797
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002798- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002799 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2800
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002801
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002802What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2803===========================
2804
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002805*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2806
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002807Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002808-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002809
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002810- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2811 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2812
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002813- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2814 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2815 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002816
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002817- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2818 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2819 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2820 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002821
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002822- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2823
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002824- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002825
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002826Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002827-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002828
2829- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002830 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002831 the module docstring for details.
2832
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002833Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002834-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002835
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002836- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002837 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2838 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2839 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002840
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002841- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2842 Nick Mathewson.
2843
2844Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002846
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002847- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2848 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2849 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2850 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2851 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2852 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2853 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2854 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2855
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002856- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2857 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2858 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2859 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2860
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002861- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2862 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2863 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2864 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2865 come a long way).
2866
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002867- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2868 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2869 write filters for these warnings).
2870
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002871- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2872 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2873 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2874 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2875 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2876
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002877- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2878 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2879 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2880 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2881 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2882 older distribution.
2883
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002884Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002885-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002886
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002887- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2888 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002889 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002890
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002891- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2892 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2893 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2894
2895- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2896
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002897- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2898
2899- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2900
2901- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2902
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002903- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002904
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002905- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2906
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002907New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002908-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002909
2910C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002912
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002913- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2914 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2915 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2916 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2917 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2918 against buffer overruns.
2919
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002920- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002921 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2922 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002923 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2924 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2925 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2926
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002927- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2928 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2929 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2930 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2931 deprecated.
2932
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002933Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002934-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002935
2936- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2937 relevant is found.
2938
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002939
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002940What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002941===========================
2942
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2944
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002945Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002946----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002947
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002948- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2949 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2950 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2951 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2952 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2953 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2954 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2955 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002956 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002957 repaired.
2958
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002959- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002960 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002961 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2962 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2963 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2964 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2965 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2966 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2967 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2968 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2969
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002970- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2971 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2972 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2973 leading BMO character).
2974
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002975- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2976 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2977 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2978
2979 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2980 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2981 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002982
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002983 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2984 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2985 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2986 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2987 for various simple to use conversions.
2988
2989 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2990 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2991
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2993 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2994 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2995 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2996 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2997 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2998 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2999 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3000 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3001 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3002 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3003 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3004 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3005 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3006 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003007
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003008- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3009 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3010 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003011 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003012 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003013
3014 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003015 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3016 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3017 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3018 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3019 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003020 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3021 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003022
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003023 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3024 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3025 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003026 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003027
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003028- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3029 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3030 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3031 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3032 floating arithmetic,
3033
3034 x = 9007199254740992.0
3035 print long(x)
3036
3037 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3038 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3039 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3040 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3041 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3042 functions are of good quality).
3043
3044 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3045 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3046 algorithms to break.
3047
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003048- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3049 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3050 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3051 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3052 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3053 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3054 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3055 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3056 order.
3057
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003058- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3059 operation along the most common code paths.
3060
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003061- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3062 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3063
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003064- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3065 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3066 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3067 {}.update(UserDict())
3068
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003069- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3070 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3071 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3072 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3073 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3074 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3075 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3076 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3077
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003078- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003079 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003081 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003082 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3083 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003084 join() method of strings
3085 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003086 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3087 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003088 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003089 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003090
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003091- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3092 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3093
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003094- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3095 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3096
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003097- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3098 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3099 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3100 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3101
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003102- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3103 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003104 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003105 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3106 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003107
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003108- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3109
3110
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003111Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003113
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003114- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003115 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003116 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3117 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3118
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003119- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3120 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3121
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003122- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3123 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3124 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3125 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3126
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003127- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3128 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3129 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3130
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003131- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3132
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003133- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3134
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003135- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3136 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3137 that are still imported into string.py).
3138
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003139- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3140
3141- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3142 Now it does.
3143
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003144- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3145
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003146- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3147 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3148 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3149 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3150 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003151 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3152 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003153
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003154- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3155 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3156 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3157 'help(object)'.
3158
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003159Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003161
3162- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003163 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003164 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3165 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3166
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003167- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003168 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3169 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003170
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003171C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003172-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003173
3174- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3175 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003176
3177----
3178
3179**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**