blob: 50f5a2718f722d1ee2a30a924288e9b6b4b1ad01 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000015- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
16 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
17 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
18
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000019- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
20 278.
21
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000022- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
23 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
24 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
25 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
26 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
27 PyNumber_*().
28 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
29
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000030- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
31 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
32 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
33 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
34
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000035- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
36 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
37 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
38 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
39 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
40
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000041- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
42 disabled caused a crash.
43
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000044- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
45 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
46
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000047- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
48 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
49
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000050- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
51
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000052- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000053 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
54 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
55 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000056
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000057- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
58
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000059- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
60 returning None.
61
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000062- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
63 ('\') with a specific error message.
64
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000065- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
66
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000067- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
68 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
69
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000070- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000071 an ferror() call.
72
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000073- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
74 list.sort().
75
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000076- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
77 (2+3) --> (5).
78
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000079- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
80
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000081- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
82 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000083
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000084- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
85 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
86 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
87
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000088Extension Modules
89-----------------
90
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +000091- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
92 if available on the platform.
93
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +000094- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
95 available on the platform.
96
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000097- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
98 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
99
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000100- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
101
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000102- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
103 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
104 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
105
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000106- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
107
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000108- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
109 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
110
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000111- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
112 file size.
113
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000114- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
115
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000116- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
117 {remove_history,replace_history}
118
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000119- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
120 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000121
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000122- stat_float_times is now True.
123
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000124- array.array objects are now picklable.
125
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000126- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
127 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
128
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000129- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
130 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
131 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
132
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000133- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
134 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000135
136Library
137-------
138
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000139- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
140 component of the path.
141
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000142- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
143 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
144 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
145 class at all.
146
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000147- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
148 files to PyPI.
149
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000150- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
151 them to PyPI.
152
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000153- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
154 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
155 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
156 work as expected.
157
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000158- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
159 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
160
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000161- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
162 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
163
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000164- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
165
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000166- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
167 to build.
168
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000169- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
170 symbolic links on Windows.
171
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000172- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
173 profile.py if available.
174
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000175- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
176
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000177- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
178 in LWPCookieJar.
179
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000180- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
181
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000182- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
183
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000184- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
185
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000186- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
187
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000188- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
189
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000190- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
191
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000192- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
193
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000194- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
195
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000196- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
197 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
198 be exploited in various ways.
199
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000200- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
201
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000202- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
203
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000204- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
205
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000206- Enhancements to the csv module:
207
208 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
209 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
210 PEP 305.
211 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
212 reporting.
213 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
214 dictates.
215 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000216 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000217 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000218 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
219 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000220 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
221 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000222 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000223 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
224 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
225 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
226 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
227 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
228 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
229 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
230 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
231 without first creating a dialect class.
232 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
233 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
234 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000235 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000236 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
237 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000238 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
239 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
240 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
241 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000242 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
243 This has been fixed.
244
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000245- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
246 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
247 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
248 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
249
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000250- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
251
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000252- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
253 (Bug #951915).
254
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000255- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
256 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
257 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
258 encoding alias table
259
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000260- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
261
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000262- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
263 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
264
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000265- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
266
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000267- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
268
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000269- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
270
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000271- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
272
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000273- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
274
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000275- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
276 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
277 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
278
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000279- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000280 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000281
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000282- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
283 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
284 tokenizer with very long source lines.
285
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000286- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
287 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
288
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000289- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
290 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000291
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000292- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
293 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
294
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000295- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
296 correctly.
297
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000298- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
299 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
300 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
301 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
302 between two lines.
303
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000304
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000305Build
306-----
307
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000308- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
309 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
310 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000311 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000312
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000313- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
314 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
315 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
316
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000317- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
318
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000319- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
320 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
321
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000322- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
323 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
324 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
325 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
326 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
327 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
328 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
329 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
330
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000331- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
332 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
333 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
334 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
335
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000336
337C API
338-----
339
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000340- Removed PyRange_New().
341
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000342
343Tests
344-----
345
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000346- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000347
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000348
349Documentation
350-------------
351
352- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
353 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
354 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
355
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000356Mac
357---
358
359
360
361Tools/Demos
362-----------
363
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000364- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000365
366
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000367What's New in Python 2.4 final?
368===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000369
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000370*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000371
372Core and builtins
373-----------------
374
375- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
376 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
377 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
378
379
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000380What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
381==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000382
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000383*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000384
385Core and builtins
386-----------------
387
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000388- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
389 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
390 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
391
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000392
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000393Library
394-------
395
396- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
397 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
398 raised is re-raised.
399
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000400- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
401 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
402
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000403- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
404 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
405 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
406 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
407 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
408 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
409 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
410 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
411 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
412 by the slice are recomputed now.
413
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000414- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000415
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000416Build
417-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000418
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000419- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
420 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
421 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000422
423C API
424-----
425
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000426- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
427
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000428
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000429What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
430================================
431
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000432*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000433
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000434License
435-------
436
437The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
438is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
439changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
440Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
441intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
442durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
443the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
444License::
445
446 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
447
448says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
449to Python 2.1.1.
450
451The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
452License Version 2.
453
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000454Core and builtins
455-----------------
456
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000457- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
458 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
459 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
460 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
461 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
462 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
463 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
464 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
465 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
466 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
467
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000468- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000469
470Extension Modules
471-----------------
472
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000473- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
474 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
475 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
476 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000477
478Library
479-------
480
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000481- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
482 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
483 returned.
484
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000485- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
486
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000487- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
488 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
489
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000490- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
491
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000492- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
493 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000494
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000495- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
496
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000497- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
498
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000499- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000500 the source code is updated and reloaded.
501
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000502Build
503-----
504
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000505- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000506
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000507What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
508================================
509
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000510*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000511
512Core and builtins
513-----------------
514
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000515- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000516 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
517
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000518- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
519 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
520 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
521 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
522
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000523- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
524 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
525
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000526- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
527 constant.
528
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000529- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
530 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
531 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
532 large), and to anomalies such as
533 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
534 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
535 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
536 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000537
538Extension modules
539-----------------
540
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000541- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
542 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000543 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
544 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
545 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000546
547Library
548-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000549
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000550- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000551 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000552 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
553 --swig-cpp.
554
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000555- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
556 it is set.
557
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000558- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000559
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000560- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
561 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
562 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
563 Closes bug #1039270.
564
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000565- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000566
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000567 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000568 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
569 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
570 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
571 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
572 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
573 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
574 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
575 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
576 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
577 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
578 + Updates to documentation.
579
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000580- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
581 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
582 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
583 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
584
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000585- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000586
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000587- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
588 applications should use the getmember function.
589
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000590- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
591
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000592- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
593 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
594 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
595 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
596 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
597 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
598 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
599 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
600 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
601
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000602- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
603 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000604 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000605
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000606- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
607 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
608 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
609 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
610 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
611 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
612 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
613 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000614
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000615- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
616 the new public features (of which there are many).
617
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000618- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000619 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
620 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
621 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
622 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000623 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000624
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000625- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
626
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000627- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
628 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
629 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
630 options.
631
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000632- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
633 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
634 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
635 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
636 conditions under which non-string values work.
637
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000638Build
639-----
640
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000641- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
642 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
643 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
644
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000645- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
646 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
647 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
648 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
649 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000650
651C API
652-----
653
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000654- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
655 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
656
657- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
658
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000659- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
660 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
661 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
662 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
663 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
664 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
665 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
666 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
667 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
668
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000669- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
670
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000671- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
672 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
673 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000674
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000675Tests
676-----
677
678- test__locale ported to unittest
679
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000680Mac
681---
682
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000683- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
684 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
685 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000686
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000687Tools/Demos
688-----------
689
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000690- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
691 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
692 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
693 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
694 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000695
696
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000697What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
698=================================
699
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000700*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000701
702Core and builtins
703-----------------
704
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000705- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000706 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
707
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000708- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
709 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
710 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
711 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
712 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
713 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
714 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
715 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000716 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
717 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
718 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
719 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
720 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000721
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000722- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
723 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
724 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
725 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
726 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
727
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000728- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
729
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000730- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
731 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
732
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000733- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
734 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
735 modified the list.
736
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000737- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
738 functions is now writable.
739
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000740- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
741 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
742 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
743 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
744
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000745- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
746 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
747 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
748 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
749 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000750
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000751- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
752 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
753
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000754Extension modules
755-----------------
756
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000757- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
758
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000759- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
760 data.
761
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000762- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
763 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
764 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
765 supposed to have been truncated away.
766
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000767- Added socket.socketpair().
768
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000769- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
770 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
771
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000772- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000773 versions of Python, have now been removed.
774
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000775Library
776-------
777
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000778- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000779 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000780
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000781- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
782 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
783
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000784- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
785 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
786
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000787- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
788
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000789- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
790 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000791
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000792- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
793 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
794
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000795- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
796
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000797- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
798
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000799- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
800
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000801- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
802 Percivall.
803
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000804- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
805 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
806
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000807- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
808 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
809 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000810 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000811
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000812- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
813 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
814 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
815 and exponent.
816
817- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
818
819- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
820 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
821 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
822
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000823- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
824 to the readline module.
825
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000826- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000827 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
828 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000829
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000830- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
831 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
832 contains symlinks.
833
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000834- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
835 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
836
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000837- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
838 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
839 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
840
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000841- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
842 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
843 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
844 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
845 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
846 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
847 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
848 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
849 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
850 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
851 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
852 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
853 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
854
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000855- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
856
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000857Tools/Demos
858-----------
859
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000860- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
861 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
862
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000863- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
864
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000865Build
866-----
867
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000868- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
869 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
870 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
871 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
872 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
873 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
874 plans to do so.
875
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000876- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
877 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
878
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000879- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
880 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
881
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000882- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
883 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
884
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000885- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
886 GNU/k*BSD systems.
887
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000888- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
889 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
890
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000891C API
892-----
893
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000894..
895
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000896Documentation
897-------------
898
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000899- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
900 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
901
902- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
903 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
904 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000905
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000906New platforms
907-------------
908
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000909- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
910
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000911Tests
912-----
913
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000914..
915
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000916Windows
917-------
918
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000919- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
920 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
921 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
922 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
923 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
924 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
925 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
926 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
927 the problem.
928
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000929Mac
930---
931
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000932..
933
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000934
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000935What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
936=================================
937
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000938*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000939
940Core and builtins
941-----------------
942
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000943- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
944 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
945 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
946 sensitive code.
947
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000948- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000949 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000950
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000951 @staticmethod
952 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000953
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000954 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000955
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000956- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
957 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
958 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
959 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
960 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
961 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
962 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
963 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
964 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
965 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
966 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
967
968 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
969 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
970 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
971 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
972 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
973 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
974 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
975
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000976- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
977 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
978
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000979- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000980 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000981
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000982- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000983 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000984 which was missing for no apparent reason.
985
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000986- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000987 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
988 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
989
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000990- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
991 types that support garbage collection.
992
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000993- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
994
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000995- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
996 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
997 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
998 Jython.
999
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001000- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1001
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001002- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1003 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1004
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001005- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1006 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1007 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001008
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001009- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1010 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1011 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1012
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001013Extension modules
1014-----------------
1015
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001016- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001018Library
1019-------
1020
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001021- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1022 TIS-620
1023
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001024- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1025 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1026 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1027 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1028 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1029 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1030 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1031 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1032 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1033 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1034
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001035- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1036
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001037- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1038 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1039 same as when the argument is omitted).
1040 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1041
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001042- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1043
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001044- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1045 schemes are offered.
1046
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001047- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1048
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001049- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1050 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1051 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1052
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001053- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1054
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001055- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1056 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1057
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001058- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1059 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1060 when dummy_threading is being used.
1061
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001062- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1063 from a tarfile.
1064
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001065- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001066 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001067
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001068- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1069 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1070 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1071 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1072
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001073- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1074 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1075
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001076- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1077 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1078 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1079 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1080 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1081 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1082 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1083 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1084 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1085 by some other method in progress).
1086
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001087- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1088 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1089 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001090
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001091- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1092
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001093- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1094 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1095 AM Kuchling.
1096
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001097- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1098 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1099 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1100
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001101- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1102 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1103 instead of unsigned.
1104
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001105- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001106 no longer part of the public API.
1107
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001108- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1109 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1110 string methods of the same name).
1111
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001112- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001113 SF patch 945642.
1114
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001115- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1116
1117 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1118
1119 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1120 DocTestSuites.
1121
1122- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1123 that provide thread-local data.
1124
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001125- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1126 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1127
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001128- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1129
1130- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1131 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1132 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1133
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001134- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1135
1136 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1137 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1138 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001139
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001140 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1141 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1142 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1143 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1144
1145 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1146 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1147
1148 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1149 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1150 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1151 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1152
1153 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1154 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1155 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1156 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1157 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1158
1159 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1160 wrapping help output.
1161
1162 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1163 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1164 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001165
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001166C API
1167-----
1168
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001169- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1170 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1171 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1172 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1173 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1174 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1175 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1176 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1177 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1178 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1179 its visible semantics have not changed.
1180
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001181- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1182 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1183
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001184Documentation
1185-------------
1186
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001187- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001188
1189 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001190 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001191
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001192 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001193
1194 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1195
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001196- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001197
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001198Tests
1199-----
1200
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001201- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001202 platforms that use the Makefile.
1203
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001204- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1205 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1206 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1207
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001208
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001209What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1210=================================
1211
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001212*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001213
1214Core and builtins
1215-----------------
1216
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001217- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1218 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1219 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1220 objects now (one object instead of three).
1221
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001222- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1223 Windows DLLs.
1224
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001225- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1226 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001227
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001228- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1229 a new .pyc magic.
1230
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001231- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1232 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1233 be there.
1234
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001235- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1236 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1237 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1238
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001239- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1240 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1241 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1242
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001243- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1244
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001245- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1246 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1247 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001248
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001249- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1250 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1251
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001252- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1253
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001254- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001255 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001256
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001257- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1258
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001259- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1260
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001261- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1262 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1263
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001264- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1265 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1266 Fixes bug #858016 .
1267
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001268- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1269 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1270 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1271
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001272- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1273 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1274 improves their performance (about 35%).
1275
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001276- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1277 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1278 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1279
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001280- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1281 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1282 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1283 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1284
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001285- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1286 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001287 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001288 length is not known).
1289
1290- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1291 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001292 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1293 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001294 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1295
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001296- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1297 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1298
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001299- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1300 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1301 keyword arguments.
1302
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001303- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1304 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1305 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1306
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001307- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1308 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1309 cases.
1310
1311- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1312 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1313 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1314 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1315 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1316 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1317 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1318 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1319 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1320 a release build.
1321
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001322- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1323 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1324
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001325- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001326 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001327
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001328- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1329 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1330 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1331 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1332 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1333 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1334 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1335 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1336 destroyed.
1337
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001338- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1339 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1340 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1341 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1342 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1343 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1344 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1345 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1346
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001347- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1348 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1349 character other than a space.
1350
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001351- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1352 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1353 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1354 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1355 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1356 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1357 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1358 attributes with the same name.
1359
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001360- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1361 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1362 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1363 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1364 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1365 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1366 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1367 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1368 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1369 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1370 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1371 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1372 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1373 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001374
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001375- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1376 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1377 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1378 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1379 This has been repaired.
1380
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001381- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1382
1383- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1384
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001385- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1386 over a sequence.
1387
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001388- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001389 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001390
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001391- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1392
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001393- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1394 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1395 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1396 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1397 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1398 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1399 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1400 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1401
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001402- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1403 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1404 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1405
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001406- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1407 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1408 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1409 freelist.
1410
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001411- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1412 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1413
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001414- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1415 number.
1416
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001417- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1418 a TypeError exception.
1419
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001420- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1421 820195.
1422
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001423- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1424 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1425 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1426
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001427- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001428 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1429 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001430
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001431- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1432 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1433 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1434
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001435- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1436 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001437 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001438
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001439- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001440 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1441 the first call.
1442
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001443
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001444Extension modules
1445-----------------
1446
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001447- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1448 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1449
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001450- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1451 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1452 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1453 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1454 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1455 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1456 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001457
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001458- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1459
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001460- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1461
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001462- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1463 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1464
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001465- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1466 fewer false positives.
1467
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001468- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1469 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1470
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001471- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001472 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1473
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001474- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001475 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001476 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001477 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1478 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001479
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001480- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1481 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1482 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1483 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1484
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001485- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1486 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1487 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1488 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1489 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1490 #897625.
1491
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001492- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1493 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1494
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001495- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1496 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1497 and pops on either side of the deque.
1498
1499- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1500 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1501
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001502- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1503 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1504 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1505 other functions that expect a function argument.
1506
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001507- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1508
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001509- os.getsid was added.
1510
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001511- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1512 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1513 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1514
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001515- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1516
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001517- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1518
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001519- readline.clear_history was added.
1520
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001521- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1522
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001523- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1524
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001525- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1526
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001527- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1528
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001529- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1530
1531- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1532
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001533- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1534
1535- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1536
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001537- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1538 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1539 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1540
1541- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1542 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1543 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1544 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1545 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1546 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1547 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1548
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001549- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1550 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1551 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1552 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001553
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001554- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001555 iterators from a single iterable.
1556
1557- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1558 of raising a TypeError exception.
1559
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001560- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1561 as parameter.
1562
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001563Library
1564-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001565
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001566- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1567 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1568 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001569
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001570- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1571 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1572 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001573
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001574- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001575
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001576- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1577 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001578
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001579- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1580 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1581
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001582- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1583
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001584- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001585 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001586
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001587- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001588 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001589
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001590- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1591
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001592- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1593 on cygwin and mingw32.
1594
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001595- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1596
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001597- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1598 module.
1599
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001600- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1601 installation scheme for all platforms.
1602
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001603- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001604 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001605
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001606- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1607 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1608 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1609
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001610- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1611 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1612 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1613
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001614- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1615
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001616- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1617
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001618- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1619 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1620
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001621- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1622 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1623 type pattern with the same value exists.
1624
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001625- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1626 when run from the command prompt).
1627
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001628- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1629 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1630
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001631- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1632 default sort).
1633
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001634- Added global runctx function to profile module
1635
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001636- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1637
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001638- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1639
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001640- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1641
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001642- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001643 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1644 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1645 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1646 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1647 accordingly.
1648
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001649- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1650 decoding standards.
1651
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001652- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1653 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1654 called for all requests.
1655
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001656- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1657 they are passed to the compiler.
1658
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001659- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1660 indent, width and depth.
1661
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001662- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1663 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1664
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001665- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1666 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1667
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001668- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1669
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001670- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1671
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001672- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1673
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001674- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1675 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1676
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001677- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001678 for better performance.
1679
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001680- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001681
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001682- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1683 a string).
1684
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001685- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1686
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001687- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1688
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001689- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1690
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001691- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1692
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001693- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1694 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1695 list of fieldnames.
1696
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001697- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1698 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1699
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001700- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1701
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001702- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1703 empty lists.
1704
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001705- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1706 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1707 and shelves.
1708
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001709- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1710 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1711
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001712- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001713 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1714 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001715
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001716- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1717 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001718 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001719
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001720- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001721 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1722 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1723
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001724- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1725 and removed in Py2.4.
1726
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001727- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1728
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001729- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1730
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001731Tools/Demos
1732-----------
1733
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001734- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1735 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1736
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001737- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1738
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001739- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1740 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1741 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1742 destination in situations where both files are given.
1743
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001744- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1745 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1746 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1747 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1748
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001749- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1750
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001751- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1752 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1753 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1754 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1755 now.
1756
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001757- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1758 in effect
1759
1760- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1761 C-c C-h
1762
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001763- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1764 -d option was given.
1765
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001766Build
1767-----
1768
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001769- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1770 build under OS X.
1771
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001772- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1773 --enable-profiling.
1774
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001775- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1776 is configured --with-tsc.
1777
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001778- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1779 on AMD64.
1780
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001781- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1782 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1783
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001784- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1785 removed.
1786
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001787- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1788 supported (see PEP 11).
1789
1790- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1791
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001792- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1793
1794- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1795 (see PEP 11).
1796
1797- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1798 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1799
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001800C API
1801-----
1802
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001803- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1804 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1805 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1806
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001807- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1808 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1809 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1810 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1811
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001812- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1813 generator objects.
1814
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001815- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1816 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001817 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1818 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001819
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001820- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1821 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1822
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001823- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1824 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1825 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1826 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1827 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1828
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001829- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1830 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1831 about 10% faster.
1832
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001833- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1834 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1835
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001836- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1837 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1838 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1839 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1840
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001841Windows
1842-------
1843
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001844- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1845 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1846 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1847 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1848
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001849- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1850 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1851 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1852
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001853
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001854What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1855===============================
1856
1857*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1858
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001859IDLE
1860----
1861
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001862- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1863 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1864 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1865 context-menu actions.
1866
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001867- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1868 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1869 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1870 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1871 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1872 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1873 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1874 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1875 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1876
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001877
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001878What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1879=============================================
1880
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001881*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001882
1883Core and builtins
1884-----------------
1885
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001886- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001887 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001888 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1889
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001890Extension modules
1891-----------------
1892
1893- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1894 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1895 than once. This has been fixed.
1896
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001897- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1898 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1899 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1900 call.
1901
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001902- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1903
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001904Library
1905-------
1906
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001907- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1908 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1909
1910- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1911 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1912 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1913 restored.
1914
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001915IDLE
1916----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001917
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001918- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001919
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001920Build
1921-----
1922
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001923- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1924 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1925
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001926C API
1927-----
1928
1929Windows
1930-------
1931
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001932- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1933 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1934
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001935- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1936
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001937Mac
1938---
1939
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001940- Various fixes to pimp.
1941
1942- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1943
1944- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1945 more problems than it solves.
1946
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001947
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001948What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1949=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001950
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001951*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1952
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001953Core and builtins
1954-----------------
1955
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001956- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1957 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1958
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001959- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1960 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001961 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001962
1963- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1964 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1965 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001966 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001967
1968- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1969 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001970
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001971- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1972 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1973 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1974
1975- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001976 770247.
1977
1978- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001979
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001980Extension modules
1981-----------------
1982
1983- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1984 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1985
1986- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1987
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001988- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1989
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001990- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1991 contained within the _strptime module.
1992
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001993- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1994 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1995
1996- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001997 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1998
1999- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2000 the find_class attribute, if present.
2001
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002002- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002003
2004 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2005 (SF bug 763298).
2006
2007 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002008 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2009 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2010 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002011
2012 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2013
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002014Library
2015-------
2016
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002017- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2018
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002019- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2020 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2021 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2022 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2023 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2024 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2025 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2026 or Tester().
2027
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002028- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2029 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2030 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2031 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2032 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2033 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2034 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2035 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2036 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002037
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002038 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002039
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002040- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2041 weren't before was an oversight.
2042
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002043- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2044 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2045
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002046- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2047 when there are no lines.
2048
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002049- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2050 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2051
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002052- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2053 to child processes.
2054
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002055- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2056
2057- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2058
2059- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2060 xmlrpclib.
2061
2062- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2063 responses.
2064
2065- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2066 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2067
2068- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2069 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2070 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2071
2072- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2073 used as patterns.
2074
2075- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2076 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2077 than Tk 8.3.
2078
2079- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2080
2081- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002082
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002083Tools/Demos
2084-----------
2085
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002086- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2087
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002088- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2089
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002090- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002091
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002092Build
2093-----
2094
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002095- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2096
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002097- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2098
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002099- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2100 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002101
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002102- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2103 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2104 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002105
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002106C API
2107-----
2108
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002109- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2110 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2111
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002112Windows
2113-------
2114
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002115- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2116 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2117 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2118 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2119 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2120 Python exception ::
2121
2122 thread.error: can't start new thread
2123
2124 is raised now.
2125
2126- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2127 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2128 instead of from DLL teardown.
2129
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002130Mac
2131---
2132
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002133- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002134 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002135 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2136 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2137 the executable in the bundle.
2138
2139- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002140
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002141- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2142
2143- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2144 on Panther.
2145
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002146What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2147================================
2148
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002149*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002150
2151Core and builtins
2152-----------------
2153
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002154- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2155 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2156 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2157 with the -i option.
2158
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002159- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2160 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2161
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002162- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2163 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2164
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002165- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2166 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2167 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2168 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2169 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2170 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2171 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2172 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2173 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2174 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2175 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2176 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2177 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002178
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002179- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2180 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2181 embedded in a lambda expression.
2182
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002183- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2184 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2185 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2186 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2187 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2188
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002189- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2190 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2191 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2192
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002193- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2194 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2195
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002196- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2197 It's writable again.
2198
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002199- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2200 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2201 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002202 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002203
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002204- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2205 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2206 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2207
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002208Extension modules
2209-----------------
2210
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002211- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2212 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2213
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002214- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2215 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2216 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2217 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2218
2219- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2220 collection.
2221
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002222- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2223 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2224 unique within a single program run.
2225
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002226- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2227 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2228
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002229- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2230 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2231
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002232- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2233 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002234
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002235- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2236
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002237- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2238 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2239
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002240- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2241 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2242 for many BSD-derived systems.
2243
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002244
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002245Library
2246-------
2247
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002248- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2249 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2250 primary ones:
2251
2252 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2253 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2254 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2255
2256 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2257 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2258 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2259 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2260 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2261 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2262
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002263- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2264 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2265 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2266 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2267 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2268 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2269 argument.
2270
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002271- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2272 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2273 in the archive.
2274
2275- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2276 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2277
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002278- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2279 569574).
2280
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002281- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2282 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2283 no more.
2284
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002285- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2286 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2287 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2288 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2289 code coverage.
2290
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002291- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2292 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2293 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002294 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2295 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002296
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002297- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2298 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2299 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002300 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002301
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002302- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2303
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002304- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2305 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2306 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2307 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2308
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002309- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2310 handling.
2311
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002312- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2313 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2314
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002315- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2316 in socket.py.
2317
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002318- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2319
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002320- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2321 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2322 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2323 opener with proxy support.
2324
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002325- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2326
2327- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2328
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002329Tools/Demos
2330-----------
2331
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002332- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2333
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002334- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2335
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002336- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2337 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002338
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002339- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2340 files.
2341
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002342Build
2343-----
2344
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002345- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002346 different root directory.
2347
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002348C API
2349-----
2350
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002351- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2352 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2353 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2354 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2355 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2356 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2357 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2358 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2359 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2360 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2361
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002362- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2363 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2364 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2365 from Python.
2366
2367
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002368New platforms
2369-------------
2370
2371None this time.
2372
2373Tests
2374-----
2375
2376- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2377 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2378
2379Windows
2380-------
2381
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002382- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2383
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002384- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2385 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2386 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2387 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2388 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2389 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2390 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2391 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2392 that's what it's for.
2393
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002394Mac
2395---
2396
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002397- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2398 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2399 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2400 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002401- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2402 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2403- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002404
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002405SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2406------------------------------------
2407
2408430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2409598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2410622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2411661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2412683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2413697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2414713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2415724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2416727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2417729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2418730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2419731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2420732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2421733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2422735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2423740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2424744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2425745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2426747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2427749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2428751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2429753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2430755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2431757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2432760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2433
2434
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002435What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2436================================
2437
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002438*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002439
2440Core and builtins
2441-----------------
2442
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002443- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2444 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2445
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002446- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2447 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2448 and cannot be strings).
2449
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002450- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2451 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2452 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2453 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2454
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002455- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2456 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2457 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2458 Python itself.
2459
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002460- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2461 the referenced object, if it has one.
2462
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002463- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2464 the thread started at
2465 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2466
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002467- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2468 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2469 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2470 placed on a list index.
2471
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002472- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2473 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2474 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2475 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2476
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002477- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2478 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2479 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2480 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2481 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2482 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2483 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2484
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002485- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2486 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2487 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2488 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2489 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2490
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002491- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2492 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002493
2494- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2495 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2496 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2497 #693195.)
2498
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002499- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2500 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002501
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002502- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002503 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002504 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2505 interpreter executions, would fail.
2506
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002507- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002508 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002509 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002510
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002511Extension modules
2512-----------------
2513
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002514- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2515 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2516 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2517 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2518
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002519- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2520 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2521
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002522- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2523 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2524 and Greg Chapman.)
2525
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002526- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2527 recursively.
2528
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002529- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002530 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2531 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2532 leaks.
2533
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002534- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2535
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002536- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2537 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2538 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2539 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2540 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2541 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2542 #705836.
2543
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002544- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002545 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2546
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002547- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2548 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2549 See SF bug #692416.
2550
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002551- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2552 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2553
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002554- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2555 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2556 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002557
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002558- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002559 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2560 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2561
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002562- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2563 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2564 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2565 timeouts to work properly.
2566
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002567Library
2568-------
2569
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002570- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2571 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2572 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2573 future release.
2574
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002575- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2576 for querying platform dependent features.
2577
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002578- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002579
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002580- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2581 pickle protocol versions.
2582
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002583- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2584 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2585 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2586
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002587- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2588
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002589- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2590 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2591 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2592 modules.
2593
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002594- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2595 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2596 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2597
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002598- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2599 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2600
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002601- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2602 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2603 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2604
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002605- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002606 MS Office extensions.
2607
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002608- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2609 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2610
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002611- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2612 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2613
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002614- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2615 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2616 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2617 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2618 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2619 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2620
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002621- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2622 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2623 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002624
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002625- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2626 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2627 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2628
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002629- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2630
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002631- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2632 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2633 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2634
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002635Tools/Demos
2636-----------
2637
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002638- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2639 See the module docstring for details.
2640
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002641Build
2642-----
2643
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002644- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2645 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002646
2647C API
2648-----
2649
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002650- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2651
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002652- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2653 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2654 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2655
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002656- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2657 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002658
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002659 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2660 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2661 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002662
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002663- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002664 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2665
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002666- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2667 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2668 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002669
2670New platforms
2671-------------
2672
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002673None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002674
2675Tests
2676-----
2677
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002678- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2679 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002680
2681Windows
2682-------
2683
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002684- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2685 function.
2686
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002687- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2688 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002689
2690Mac
2691---
2692
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002693- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2694 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002695
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002696- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2697 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002698
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002699- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2700 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2701 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002702
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002703- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002704 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2705 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002706
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002707- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2708 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002709
2710
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002711What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2712=================================
2713
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002714*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002715
2716Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002717-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002718
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002719- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2720 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2721 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2722
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002723- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2724 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2725 (SF patch #664376.)
2726
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002727- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2728 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2729 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2730 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2731 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2732 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002733 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002734
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002735- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2736 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2737 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2738 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002739 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002740
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002741- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2742 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2743 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2744 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2745 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2746 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2747 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2748 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2749 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2750 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2751 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2752
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002753- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2754 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2755 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2756 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2757 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2758 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2759
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002760- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2761 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2762
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002763- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2764 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2765 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2766 case.)
2767
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002768- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2769 passed as unicode strings.
2770
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002771- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2772 See SF bug #683467.
2773
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002774- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2775 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2776
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002777- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2778
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002779- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2780
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002781- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2782 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2783 arguments.
2784
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002785- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2786 See SF bug #667147.
2787
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002788- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002789 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002790 See SF bug #676155.
2791
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002792- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002793 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002794 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2795 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2796 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2797 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2798 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2799 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002800
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002801Extension modules
2802-----------------
2803
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002804- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2805 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2806 tp_as_number pointer.
2807
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002808- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2809 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2810 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2811 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2812 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2813
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002814- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2815
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002816- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2817
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002818- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002819 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002820 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2821 patch #678531.)
2822
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002823- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2824 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2825
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002826- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2827 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2828
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002829- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2830
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002831- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2832 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2833 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2834
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002835- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2836
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002837- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2838 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2839
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002840- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002841
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002842- datetime changes:
2843
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002844 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2845
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002846 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2847 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2848 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2849 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2850 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2851 now.
2852
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002853 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002854 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2855 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002856
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002857 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002858 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002859 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2860 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2861 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2862 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002863
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002864 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2865 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2866 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002867 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2868
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002869 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2870 by a later example coded by Guido.
2871
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002872 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002873 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2874 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2875 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002876 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2877 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2878
2879 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2880 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2881 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2882 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2883 tzinfo subclass instance.
2884
2885 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2886 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2887 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2888 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2889 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2890 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2891 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2892 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002893
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002894 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2895 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2896 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2897 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2898 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002899 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2900
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002901 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002902
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002903 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2904 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2905 as a naive datetime object.
2906
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002907 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2908 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2909 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2910
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002911 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2912 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2913 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2914 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2915 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2916 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2917 comparison.
2918
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002919 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2920 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2921 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2922 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002923 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002924
2925 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002926
2927 and ::
2928
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002929 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2930
2931 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2932 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2933 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2934 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2935
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002936 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2937 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2938 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2939 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2940 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2941
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002942 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2943 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002944 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2945 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002946
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002947Library
2948-------
2949
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002950- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2951 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2952
2953- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2954 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2955 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2956 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2957 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2958 See PEP 307 for details.
2959
2960- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2961 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2962
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002963- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2964 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002965 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002966 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2967 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002968 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002969
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002970- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2971 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2972
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002973- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2974 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2975 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2976
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002977- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2978
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002979- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2980 exception.
2981
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002982- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2983 class.
2984
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002985- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2986 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2987 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2988
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002989- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2990 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2991
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002992- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002993 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2994 See SF bug #659228.
2995
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002996- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2997 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2998 See SF patch #651082.
2999
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003000- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003001
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003002- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3003 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3004
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003005- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003006 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003007
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003008- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3009 DOS paths from other platforms.
3010
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003011Tools/Demos
3012-----------
3013
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003014- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3015 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3016 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3017 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3018 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3019 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3020 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3021 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3022 example:
3023
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003024 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3025 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003026
3027 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3028
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003029
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003030Build
3031-----
3032
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003033- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3034 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3035 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003036 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3037
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003038 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3039
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003040- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3041 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3042 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3043 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3044 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3045 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3046 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3047 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3048 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3049
3050- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3051 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3052 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3053 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3054
3055- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3056 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3057
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003058C API
3059-----
3060
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003061- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3062 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003063
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003064- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3065 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3066 tp_as_number pointer.
3067
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003068- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3069 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3070 (SF #681367)
3071
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003072- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3073 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3074 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3075 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003076
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003077Tests
3078-----
3079
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003080- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003081 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3082 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3083 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3084 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3085 pydoc.)
3086
3087- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3088
3089- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003090
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003091Windows
3092-------
3093
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003094- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3095 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3096 time).
3097
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003098- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3099 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3100
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003101- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3102 release without strong cryptography.
3103
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003104- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003105 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003106
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003107- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3108 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3109
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003110Mac
3111---
3112
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003113- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3114 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003115
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003116- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3117 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3118 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003119
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003120- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3121 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003122
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003123- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3124 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3125 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3126 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003127
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003128- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003129 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3130 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3131 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003132
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003133
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003134What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003135=================================
3136
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003137*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003139Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003141
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003142- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3143
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003144- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3145 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003146 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003147 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003148 a different meaning than before.
3149
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003150- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003151 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003152 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003153
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003154- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003155 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003156 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003157
3158- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3159 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3160 and deallocation.
3161
3162- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3163 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3164
3165- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3166 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3167 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3168 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3169 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3170
3171- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3172 now detected by the garbage collector.
3173
3174- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3175 [SF bug 519621]
3176
3177- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3178 identifier.
3179
3180- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3181 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3182 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3183 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3184 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3185 [SF bug 563060]
3186
3187- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3188 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3189 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3190 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3191 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3192
3193- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3194 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3195 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3196
3197- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3198
3199- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3200 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3201 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3202 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3203 state of the slots would be lost.)
3204
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003205Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003206-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003207
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003208- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003209 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3210 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3211 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3212 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003213 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3214 Jython 2.1.
3215
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003216- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003217 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003218 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3219 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3220 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3221 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3222 these, see PEP 302.
3223
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003224- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3225 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3226 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3227
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003228- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3229 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3230 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3231
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003232- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3233 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3234 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3235
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003236- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3237 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3238 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3239 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3240 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3241 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3242 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3243 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3244 releases or implementations.
3245
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003246- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003247 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3248 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003249
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003250- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3251 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3252
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003253- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3254 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3255 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3256
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003257- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3258 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3259
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003260- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3261 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003262 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3263 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003264
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003265- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3266 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3267 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3268 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3269 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3270
3271 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3272 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3273 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3274 pattern.
3275
3276 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3277 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3278 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3279 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3280
3281 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3282 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3283 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3284 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3285 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3286 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3287
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003288- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3289 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3290 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3291 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3292 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3293 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3294 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3295 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003296
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003297- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3298 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3299 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3300 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3301 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003302 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3303 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3304 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3305 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3306 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3307 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3308 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003309
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003310- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3311 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3312
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003313- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3314 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3315 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3316 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3317 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3318 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3319 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3320 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3321 to Zack Weinberg!
3322
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003323- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3324 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3325 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3326 type. This has been fixed now.
3327
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003328- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3329 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3330 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3331
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003332- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3333 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3334 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3335 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3336 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3337 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3338 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3339 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003340 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003341
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003342- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3343 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3344 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003345
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003346- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3347 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3348 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3349 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3350 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3351 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3352 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3353 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003354 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003355 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3356 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3357
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003358- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3359 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3360 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3361 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3362 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3363 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3364 this.)
3365
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003366- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3367 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003368 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003369 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003370 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3371 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003372 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3373 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003374
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003375- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3376 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3377 currently running.
3378
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003379- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3380 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3381 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3382 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3383
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003384- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3385 as directory names.
3386
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003387- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3388 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3389
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003390- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3391 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3392
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003393- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003394 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3395 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003396
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003397- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3398 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3399 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3400 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3401 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3402
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003403- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3404 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3405 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3406 removed.
3407
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003408- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3409 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3410 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3411
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003412- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3413 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3414 to __debug__.
3415
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003416- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3417 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3418 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3419
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003420- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3421 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3422 deprecated now.
3423
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003424- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3425 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3426 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003427
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003428- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3429 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3430 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3431 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3432 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003433
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003434- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3435 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3436
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003437- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3438 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3439 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003440 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003441 is backward compatible.
3442
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003443- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3444 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3445 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3446 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3447 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3448
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003449- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3450 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3451 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3452 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3453 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3454 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003455
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003456- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3457 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3458
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003459- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3460 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3461
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003462- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3463 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3464 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3465 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3466 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3467
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003468- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3469 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3470 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3471
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003472- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003473 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3474
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003475- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3476 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3477 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003478
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003479- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3480 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3481
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003482- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3483 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3484 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3485
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003486- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3487
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003488Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003489-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003490
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003491- Added three operators to the operator module:
3492 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3493 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3494 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3495
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003496- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3497
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003498- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3499 archives.
3500
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003501- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3502 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3503 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3504
3505 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3506
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003507- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3508 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3509 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003510 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003511
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003512- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3513 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3514 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3515 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003516 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3517 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3518 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3519 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003520
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003521- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3522 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003523
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003524- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3525
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003526- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3527 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3528
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003529- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3530 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3531 supported.
3532
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003533- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3534
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003535- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3536 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003537
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003538- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3539 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3540
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003541- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3542
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003543- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3544 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3545
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003546- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3547 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3548 functions but callable type objects.
3549
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003550- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003551 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003552 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003553
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003554- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3555 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003556
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003557- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3558 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003559
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003560- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3561 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3562 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3563 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3564
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003565- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3566 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003567
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003568- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3569 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3570 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3571 and __imul__.
3572
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003573- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003574 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3575 is called.
3576
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003577- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3578 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3579 interpreter was compiled.
3580
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003581- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3582 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3583 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003584 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003585 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3586 1, not 2.
3587
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003588- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3589 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3590 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3591 limit.
3592
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003593- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3594 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3595 bug #623464.
3596
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003597- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3598 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3599 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3600 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3601
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003602Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003603-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003604
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003605- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3606
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003607- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3608 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3609 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3610 with Python 2.3a2.
3611
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003612- os.path exposes getctime.
3613
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003614- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003615 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003616 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003617 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003618 unit tests of floating point results.
3619
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003620- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3621 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3622 has been increased.
3623
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003624- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3625 executed.
3626
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003627- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3628 postinstallation script.
3629
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003630- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3631 test the current module.
3632
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003633- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003634 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3635 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3636 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3637 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3638
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003639- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003640 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003641 Ward's Optik package.
3642
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003643- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3644 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3645 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3646 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3647
3648- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3649 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003650 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003651
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003652- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3653 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3654 shelf are binary pickles.
3655
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003656- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3657 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3658
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003659- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3660 modules are iterators now.
3661
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003662- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3663 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3664 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3665 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3666 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3667 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003668
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003669- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3670 with their entity value.
3671
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003672- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3673
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003674- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3675 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003676
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003677- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3678 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003679 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003680
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003681- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3682 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3683 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3684 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3685 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3686 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3687 main():
3688
3689 import locale
3690 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3691
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003692- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3693 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3694
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003695- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3696 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3697 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3698 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3699 to the new standard.
3700
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003701- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3702 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3703 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3704 an extension to the database.
3705
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003706- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3707 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3708 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3709 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003710 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003711
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003712- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003713 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003714
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003715- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3716 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3717 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3718 bounded integers.
3719
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003720- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3721 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3722 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3723 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3724 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3725 in existence.
3726
3727 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3728 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3729 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3730 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3731 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3732 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3733
3734 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3735 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3736 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3737 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3738
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003739- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3740 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3741 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3742
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003743- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3744
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003745- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3746 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3747 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3748 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3749
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003750- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3751 argument.
3752
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003753- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3754 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3755 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3756 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3757 [SF patch 560794].
3758
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003759- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3760 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3761 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003762 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3763 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3764 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003765
3766- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3767 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003768
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003769- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3770 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3771 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3772 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003773
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003774- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3775 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3776 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3777 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3778 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3779
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003780- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003781
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003782- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3783
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003784- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3785 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3786 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3787 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3788 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3789 identical to None.
3790
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003791- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3792 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3793 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3794 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3795 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3796 results now.
3797
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003798- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3799 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3800
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003801- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3802 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3803 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3804 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3805 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3806 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3807 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3808 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3809
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003810- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3811
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003812- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3813 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3814
3815- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3816 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3817 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3818 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3819 and other systems.
3820
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003821- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3822 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3823 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3824 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 +00003825 work well with these.
3826
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003827- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3828
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003829- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003830 connections.
3831
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003832- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3833 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3834 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3835
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003836- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3837 sets
3838
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003839- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3840 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3841 name.
3842
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003843- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3844 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3845 passed in.
3846
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003847- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003848 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003849 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3850 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003851
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003852- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3853
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003854- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3855
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003856- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3857 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3858 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3859
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003860- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3861 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3862 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3863 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003864 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003865
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003866- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003867 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003868 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003869
3870- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3871 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3872 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3873
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003874- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003875 the value of its expression argument.
3876
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003877- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3878 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3879 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3880
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003881- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3882 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3883 skipstone browser was included.
3884
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003885- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3886 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3887
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003888Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003890
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003891- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3892 names in addition to accepting file names.
3893
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003894- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3895 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3896 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3897 still used and useful.)
3898
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003899- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3900 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3901 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3902 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003903
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003904- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3905 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3906 the generated binary.
3907
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003908Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003910
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003911- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3912
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003913- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3914 except in the hands of experts.
3915
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003916- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003917 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3918 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3919 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003920
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003921- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3922 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3923 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3924 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3925 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3926 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3927 builds.
3928
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003929- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3930 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3931 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3932 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3933 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3934 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3935 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3936 new type.
3937
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003938- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003939
3940 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3941 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3942 positive infinities.
3943
3944 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3945 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3946 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3947 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3948 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3949 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3950 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3951
3952 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3953
3954 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3955
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003956- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3957 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3958 size of the executable.
3959
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003960- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3961 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3962 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3963 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003964
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003965- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3966
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003967- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3968 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3969 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003970
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003971- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3972 well as Unix.
3973
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003974- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3975 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3976 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3977 modules in the README file for details.
3978
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003979C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003981
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003982- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3983 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003984 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003985 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003986 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003987
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003988- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3989 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3990 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3991 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3992 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3993 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003994 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003995 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3996 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3997 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3998 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3999 aligned.)
4000
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004001- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4002 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4003 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4004
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004005- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4006 level.
4007
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004008- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4009 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4010 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4011 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4012 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4013
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004014- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4015 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4016 code.
4017
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004018- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4019 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4020 adjusting for negative indices.
4021
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004022- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4023 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4024 object.
4025
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004026- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4027 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4028 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4029
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004030- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4031 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004032
4033- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4034
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004035- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4036 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4037 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4038 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4039
4040- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4041
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004042- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004043
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004044- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004045 without going through the buffer API.
4046
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004048
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004049- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4050 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4051 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4052 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4053
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004054- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4055 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4056
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004057- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004058 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4059
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004060New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004062
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004063- OpenVMS is now supported.
4064
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004065- AtheOS is now supported.
4066
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004067- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4068
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004069- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4070
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004071Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----
4073
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004074- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4075 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4076 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004077
4078Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004080
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004081- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4082 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4083 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4084 bugs.
4085 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004086 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004087 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4088 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004089 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004090
4091- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004092 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004093
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004094- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4095 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4096
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004097- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4098 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004099 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004100 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4101
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004102- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4103 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4104 use files" uninstall option).
4105
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004106- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4107
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004108- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4109 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4110
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004111- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4112 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4113 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4114
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004115- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4116 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4117 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4118 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4119 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004120 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4121 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4122 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004123
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004124- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004125 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004126 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4127 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4128 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4129 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4130 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4131 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4132 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4133 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4134 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4135 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4136 work around.
4137
4138- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4139 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4140 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4141 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4142 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4143 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4144 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4145 specified with O_CREAT too).
4146
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004147Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004148----
4149
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004150- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004151
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004152- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4153 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4154 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4155
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004156- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4157 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4158 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4159
4160- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4161 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4162 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4163 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4164 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4165 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4166 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4167 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004168
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004169- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4170 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4171 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004172
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004173- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4174 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4175 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4176 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4177 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004178
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004179- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4180 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4181 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004182
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004183- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4184 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004185
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004186- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4187 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4188 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4189 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4190 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004191
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004192- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4193 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4194 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4195
4196- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4197 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4198 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004199
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004200- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4201 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4202 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4203 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004204 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004205
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004206- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4207 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004208
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004209- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4210 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004211
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004212- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004213 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004214 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4215 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004216
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004217
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004218What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004219===============================
4220
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4222
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004223Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004224--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004225
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004226- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4227 with a custom metaclass.
4228
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004229Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004230-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004231
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004232- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4233 are proxies.
4234
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004235Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004237
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004238- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4239 very short strings.
4240
4241- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4242 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4243 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4244 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4245 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4246
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004247Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004248-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004249
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004250- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4251 close or delete time).
4252
4253- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4254 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4255
4256- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4257
4258- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004259 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004260
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004261Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004263
4264Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004266
4267C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004269
4270New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004272
4273Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004274-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004275
4276Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004277-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004278
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004279- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4280
4281- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4282 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4283
4284- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4285 deleted at process exit time.
4286
4287- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4288 in backslash.
4289
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004290Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004291----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004292
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004293- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4294 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4295 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4296
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004297
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004298What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004299===========================
4300
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4302
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004303Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004305
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004306- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4307 been extensively updated. See
4308
4309 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4310
4311 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4312
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004313- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4314 deleted!
4315
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004316- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4317 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4318 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4319 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4320 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4321
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004322- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4323
4324 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4325 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4326
4327 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4328 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4329 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4330 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4331 supported anyway.
4332
4333 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4334 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4335
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004336- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4337 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4338 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4339 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4340 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004341
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004342- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4343 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4344 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4345
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004346Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004348
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004349- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4350 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4351 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4352 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4353 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4354 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004355 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4356 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4357 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4358 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004359
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004360- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4361 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4362 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4363
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004364Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004366
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004367- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4368
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004369Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004371
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004372- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4373 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4374 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4375 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4376 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4377 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4378
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004379- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4380
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004381- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4382
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004383- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4384
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004385- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4386 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4387 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4388
4389- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4390
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004391Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004392-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004393
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004394- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4395 off a search on Google.
4396
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004397Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004398-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004399
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004400- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4401 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4402 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4403 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4404 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4405 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4406 other platforms should do likewise.
4407
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004408- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4409 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4410 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4411
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004412C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004414
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004415- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4416 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4417 producing key-value pairs.
4418
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004419- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004420 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004421 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4422 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4423 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4424 previously went unchallenged.
4425
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004426New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004427-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004428
4429Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004431
4432Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004434
4435Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004437
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004438- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4439 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004440
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004441- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4442 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4443 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4444 home.
4445
4446
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004447What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004448===========================
4449
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4451
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004452Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004454
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004455- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4456 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004457
4458 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004459 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004460
4461 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4462 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004463 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004464 This needs to be documented.
4465
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004466- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4467 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4468
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004469- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4470 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4471 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4472
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004473- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4474 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4475
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004476- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4477 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4478 class forbids it).
4479
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004480- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4481 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4482 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4483
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004484- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4485
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004486Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004488
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004489- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4490 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004491 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004492
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004493- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4494 (like 1 + '').
4495
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004496Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004497-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004498
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004499- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4500 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4501 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4502 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004503 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004504 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4505
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004506- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4507 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4508 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4509 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4510
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004511- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4512 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004513 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4514 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4515 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004516
4517- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4518 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004519
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004520- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4521 bytes on its input.
4522
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004523Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004524-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004525
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004526- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004527 convenience function.
4528
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004529- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4530 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4531 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004532 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4533 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4534 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4535 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4536 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4537 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004538
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004539- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4540 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4541 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4542 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4543
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004544- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4545 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4546 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4547
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004548- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4549 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4550 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4551 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4552
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004553- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4554 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004555 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004556 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4557 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4558 new -l and -e options.
4559
4560- statcache is now deprecated.
4561
4562- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4563 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004565 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4566 time properly taken into account.
4567
4568- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4569 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4570 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4571 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4572
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004573Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004575
4576Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004578
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004579- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4580 is built with libdb3 if available.
4581
4582- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4583
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004584C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004585-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004586
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004587- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4588 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4589 PySequence_Size().
4590
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004591- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4592
4593- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4594 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4595 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4596
4597- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4598 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4599
4600- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4601 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4602
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004603New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004605
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004606- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4607 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4608
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004609- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4610 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4611
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004612- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4613
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004614Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004616
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004617- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4618 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4619
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004620Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004622
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004623Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004624----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004625
4626- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4627 removed completely in the next release.
4628
4629- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4630 OSX.
4631
4632- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4633 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4634
4635- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4636
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004637
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004638What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004639===========================
4640
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004641*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4642
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004643Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004645
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004646- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004647 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004648 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004649 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4650 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004651 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4652 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004653 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4654 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004655
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004656- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4657 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4658
4659- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4660 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4661
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004662Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004663-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004664
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004665- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4666 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4667 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4668 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4669 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4670 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4671 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4672 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4673
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004674- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4675 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4676 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4677 example).
4678
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004679- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004680 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004681 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004682 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004683
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004684- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4685 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4686 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004687 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004688
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004689- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4690 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4691 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4692 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4693 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4694 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4695
4696 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4697
4698 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4699
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004700Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004702
4703- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4704
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004705- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4706
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004707- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4708 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004709
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004710- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4711 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4712 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4713 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4714 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4715 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004716 attributes.
4717
4718- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4719 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4720 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004721
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004722- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4723 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4724 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004725
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004726- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4727 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4728 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004729 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4730 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4731
4732- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4733 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004734
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004735Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004736-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004737
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004738- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4739 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4740
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004741- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4742 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4743 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4744 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4745
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004746- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4747 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4748 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4749 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4750
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004751 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4752 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4753 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4754 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4755 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4756 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4757 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4758 without losing information).
4759
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004760- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004761 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4762 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4763 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4764 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4765 module).
4766
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004767 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004768 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4769 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4770 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4771 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004772
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004773- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004774 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4775 encoding.
4776
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004777- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4778 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4779
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004780- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004781 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4782
4783- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4784 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4785 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4786 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4787
4788- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4789
4790- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4791 ON, and OFF.
4792
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004793- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4794 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4795
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004796Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004798
4799- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4800 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4801 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004802
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004803- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4804 been added: -X and -E.
4805
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004806Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004808
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004809- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4810 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4811
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004812C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004814
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004815- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4816 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4817 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4818 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4819 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4820
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004821- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4822 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4823 as long) arguments.
4824
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004825- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4826 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4827 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4828 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4829 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4830 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4831
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004832- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4833 input.
4834
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004835New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004836-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004837
4838Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004840
4841Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004843
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004844- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4845 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4846 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4847
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004848- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4849 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4850 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004851 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004852
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004853 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4854 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4855 import signal
4856 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004857
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004859 while 1:
4860 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004862 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4863 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4864 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4865 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004866
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004867
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004868What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4869===========================
4870
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004871*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4872
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004873Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004875
4876- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4877 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4878 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4879
4880- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4881 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4882 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4883 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4884 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4885 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4886 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004887
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004888- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004889 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004890 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4891 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4892 associate a docstring with a property.
4893
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004894- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4895 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4896 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4897 other built-in object types.
4898
4899- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4900 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4901 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4902 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4903 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4904
4905- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4906 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4907
4908- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4909 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004910 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004911 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4912 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4913 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4914 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4915 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4916
4917- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4918 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4919 class.
4920
4921- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4922 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4923 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4924 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4925
4926- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4927 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4928 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4929 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4930
4931- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4932 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4933
4934- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4935 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4936 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4937 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4938 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004939 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004940 with the same value as s.
4941
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004942- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4943
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004944Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004946
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004947- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4948
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004949- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4950 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4951 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4952 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4953 objects.
4954
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004955- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4956 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004957 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4958 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4959
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004960- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4961 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4962 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4963
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004964Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004965-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004966
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004967- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4968 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4969 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4970 by the instances.
4971
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004972- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4973 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4974 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4975
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004976- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4977 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4978 before the entire comparison is complete.
4979
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004980- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4981 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4982 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4983
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004984- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4985 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4986 getwriter().
4987
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004988- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4989 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4990
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004991- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004992 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4993 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4994
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004995- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4996 iterable object.
4997
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004998- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4999 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005000
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005001- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5002 authentication.
5003
5004- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5005 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005006
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005007- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005008 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5009 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5010 a sample driver.)
5011
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005012Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005013-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005014
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005015- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5016 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5017 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5018 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5019 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5020 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5021 kernel has large file support.
5022
5023- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5024 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5025 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5026 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5027 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5028
5029- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5030 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5031 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5032
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005033C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005034-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005035
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005036- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5037 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5038
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005039New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005040-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005041
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005042- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5043 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5044
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005045Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005046-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005047
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005048- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5049 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5050 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5051 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5052 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5053
5054- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5055 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5056 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5057 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5058
5059- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5060 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5061
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005062Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005063-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005064
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005065- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005066 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5067 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005068
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005069
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005070What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5071===========================
5072
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005073*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5074
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005075Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005076----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005077
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005078- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5079 big to represent as a C double.
5080
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005081- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5082 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5083 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5084 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5085 restriction).
5086
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005087- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5088 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5089 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5090 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5091 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5092
5093 >>> dir([])
5094 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5095 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5096 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5097 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5098 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5099 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5100 'reverse', 'sort']
5101
5102 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5103
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005104- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005105 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5106 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5107 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5108 OverflowError exception.
5109
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005110- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005111 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005112 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5113 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5114 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5115 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5116 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005117 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5119 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5120
5121 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5122 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5123 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5124 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005125
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005126- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005127 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5128 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5129 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5130 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5131 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5132 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5133 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5134 once it is created.
5135
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005136- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5137 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5138 (key, value) pairs.
5139
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005140- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005141 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5142 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5143
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005144- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5145 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5146 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5147 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5148 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005149
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005150- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005151 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5152 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5153
5154 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5155
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005156- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005157 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5158
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005159Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005160-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005161
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005162- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005163 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5164 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005165
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005166- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5167 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5168 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5169 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5170 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5171 in this area anymore).
5172
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005173- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5174 threading.Timer.
5175
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005176- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5177 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5178
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005179- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005180 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5181
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005182- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005183 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5184 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5185 converted to Python longs.
5186
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005187- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005188 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5189
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005190- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5191 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5192 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5193
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005194Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005195-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005196
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005197- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5198 division operators as per PEP 238.
5199
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005200Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005201-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005202
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005203- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5204 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5205 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5206 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5207
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005208C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005209-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005210
5211- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005212
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005213- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5214 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005215 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005216
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005217 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5218 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005219 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005220 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005221
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005222- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005223 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5224 module:
5225
5226 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005227
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005228 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5229 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005230
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005231 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5232 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005233
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005234 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5235
5236 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5237
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005238- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005239 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5240 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5241 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005242
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005243New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005244-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005245
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005246- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5247 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5248 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5249 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5250 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005251
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005252Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005253-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005254
5255Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005256-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005257
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005258- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5259 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5260 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5261 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005262 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5263 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5264 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5265 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5266 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005267
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005268- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005269 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5270
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005271
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005272What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5273===========================
5274
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005275*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5276
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005277Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005278-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005279
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005280- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5281 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5282
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005283- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5284 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5285 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005286
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005287- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5288 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5289 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5290 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005291
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005292- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5293
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005294- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005295
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005296Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005298
5299- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005300 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005301 the module docstring for details.
5302
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005303Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005304-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005305
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005306- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005307 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5308 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5309 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005310
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005311- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5312 Nick Mathewson.
5313
5314Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005315----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005316
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005317- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5318 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5319 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5320 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5321 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5322 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5323 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5324 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5325
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005326- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5327 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5328 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5329 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5330
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005331- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5332 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5333 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5334 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5335 come a long way).
5336
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005337- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5338 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5339 write filters for these warnings).
5340
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005341- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5342 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5343 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5344 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5345 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5346
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005347- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5348 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5349 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5350 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5351 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5352 older distribution.
5353
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005354Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005355-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005356
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005357- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5358 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005359 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005360
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005361- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5362 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5363 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5364
5365- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5366
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005367- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5368
5369- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5370
5371- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5372
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005373- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005374
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005375- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5376
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005377New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005378-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005379
5380C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005381-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005382
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005383- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5384 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5385 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5386 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5387 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5388 against buffer overruns.
5389
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005390- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005391 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5392 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005393 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5394 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5395 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5396
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005397- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5398 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5399 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5400 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5401 deprecated.
5402
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005403Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005404-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005405
5406- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5407 relevant is found.
5408
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005409
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005410What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005411===========================
5412
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005413*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5414
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005415Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005416----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005417
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005418- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5419 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5420 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5421 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5422 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5423 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5424 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5425 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005426 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005427 repaired.
5428
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005429- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005430 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005431 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5432 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5433 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5434 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5435 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5436 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5437 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5438 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5439
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005440- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5441 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5442 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5443 leading BMO character).
5444
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005445- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5446 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5447 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5448
5449 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5450 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5451 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005452
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005453 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5454 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5455 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5456 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5457 for various simple to use conversions.
5458
5459 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5460 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5461
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005462 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5463 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5464 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5465 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5466 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5467 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5468 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5469 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5470 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5471 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5472 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5473 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5474 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5475 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5476 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005477
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005478- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5479 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5480 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005481 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005482 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005483
5484 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005485 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5486 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5487 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5488 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5489 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005490 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5491 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005492
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005493 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5494 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5495 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005496 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005497
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005498- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5499 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5500 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5501 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5502 floating arithmetic,
5503
5504 x = 9007199254740992.0
5505 print long(x)
5506
5507 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5508 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5509 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5510 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5511 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5512 functions are of good quality).
5513
5514 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5515 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5516 algorithms to break.
5517
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005518- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5519 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5520 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5521 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5522 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5523 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5524 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5525 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5526 order.
5527
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005528- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5529 operation along the most common code paths.
5530
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005531- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5532 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5533
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005534- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5535 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5536 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5537 {}.update(UserDict())
5538
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005539- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5540 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5541 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5542 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5543 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5544 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5545 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5546 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5547
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005548- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005549 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005550
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005551 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005552 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5553 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005554 join() method of strings
5555 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005556 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5557 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005558 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005559 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005560
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005561- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5562 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5563
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005564- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5565 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5566
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005567- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5568 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5569 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5570 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5571
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005572- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5573 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005574 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005575 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5576 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005577
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005578- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5579
5580
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005581Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005582-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005583
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005584- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005585 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005586 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5587 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5588
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005589- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5590 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5591
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005592- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5593 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5594 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5595 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5596
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005597- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5598 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5599 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5600
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005601- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5602
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005603- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5604
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005605- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5606 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5607 that are still imported into string.py).
5608
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005609- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5610
5611- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5612 Now it does.
5613
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005614- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5615
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005616- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5617 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5618 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5619 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5620 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005621 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5622 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005623
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005624- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5625 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5626 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5627 'help(object)'.
5628
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005629Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005630-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005631
5632- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005633 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005634 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5635 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5636
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005637- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005638 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5639 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005640
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005641C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005642-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005643
5644- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5645 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005646
5647----
5648
5649**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**