blob: 003e3d56805b7a8fb6c4c1f7217e97e7dca3d5da [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000026- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
27 types that support garbage collection.
28
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000029- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
30
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000031Extension modules
32-----------------
33
34Library
35-------
36
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000037- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
38 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
39
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000040- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
41 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
42 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
43 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
44 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
45 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
46 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
47 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
48 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
49 by some other method in progress).
50
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000051- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
52 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
53 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000054
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000055- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
56
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000057- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
58 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
59 AM Kuchling.
60
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000061- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
62 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
63 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
64
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000065- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
66 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
67 instead of unsigned.
68
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000069- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000070 no longer part of the public API.
71
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000072- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
73 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
74 string methods of the same name).
75
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000076- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
77 SF patch 982681.
78
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000079- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000080 SF patch 945642.
81
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000082- doctest unittest integration improvements:
83
84 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
85
86 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
87 DocTestSuites.
88
89- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
90 that provide thread-local data.
91
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000092Tools/Demos
93-----------
94
95Build
96-----
97
98C API
99-----
100
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000101- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
102 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
103
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000104Documentation
105-------------
106
107Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
108
109 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
110 assigning thier values
111
112 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
113
114 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
115
116
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000117New platforms
118-------------
119
120Tests
121-----
122
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000123- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
124 platforms that use the Makefile.
125
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000126Windows
127-------
128
129Mac
130---
131
132
133
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000134What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
135=================================
136
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000137*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000138
139Core and builtins
140-----------------
141
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000142- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
143 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
144 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
145 objects now (one object instead of three).
146
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000147- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
148 Windows DLLs.
149
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000150- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
151
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000152- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
153 a new .pyc magic.
154
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000155- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
156 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
157 be there.
158
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000159- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
160 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
161 the LC_NUMERIC category.
162
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000163- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
164 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
165 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
166
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000167- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
168
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000169- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
170 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
171 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000172
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000173- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
174 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
175
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000176- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
177
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000178- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000179 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000180
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000181- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
182
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000183- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
184
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000185- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
186 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
187
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000188- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
189 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
190 Fixes bug #858016 .
191
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000192- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
193 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
194 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
195
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000196- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
197 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
198 improves their performance (about 35%).
199
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000200- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
201 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
202 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
203
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000204- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
205 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
206 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
207 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
208
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000209- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
210 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
211 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
212 length is not known).
213
214- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
215 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000216 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
217 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000218 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
219
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000220- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
221 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
222
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000223- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
224 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
225 keyword arguments.
226
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000227- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
228 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
229 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
230
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000231- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
232 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
233 cases.
234
235- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
236 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
237 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
238 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
239 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
240 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
241 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
242 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
243 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
244 a release build.
245
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000246- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
247 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
248
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000249- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000250 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000251
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000252- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
253 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
254 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
255 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
256 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
257 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
258 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
259 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
260 destroyed.
261
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000262- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
263 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
264 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
265 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
266 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
267 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
268 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
269 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
270
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000271- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
272 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
273 character other than a space.
274
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000275- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
276 by the function object or by the method object, the function
277 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
278 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
279 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
280 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
281 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
282 attributes with the same name.
283
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000284- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
285 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
286 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
287 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
288 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
289 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
290 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
291 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
292 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
293 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
294 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
295 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
296 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
297 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000298
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000299- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
300 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
301 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
302 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
303 This has been repaired.
304
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000305- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
306
307- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
308
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000309- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
310 over a sequence.
311
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000312- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000313 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000314
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000315- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
316
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000317- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
318 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
319 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
320 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
321 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
322 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
323 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
324 records with equal keys is unchanged).
325
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000326- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
327 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
328 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
329
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000330- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
331 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
332 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
333 freelist.
334
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000335- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
336 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
337
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000338- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
339 number.
340
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000341- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
342 a TypeError exception.
343
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000344- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
345 820195.
346
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000347- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
348 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
349 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
350
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000351- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000352 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
353 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000354
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000355- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
356 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
357 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
358
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000359- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
360 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000361 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000362
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000363- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000364 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
365 the first call.
366
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000367
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000368Extension modules
369-----------------
370
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000371- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
372 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
373
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000374- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
375 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
376 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
377 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
378 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
379 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
380 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000381
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000382- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
383
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000384- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
385
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000386- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
387 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
388
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000389- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
390 fewer false positives.
391
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000392- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
393 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
394
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000395- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000396 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
397
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000398- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000399 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000400 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
401 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
402 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000403
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000404- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
405 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
406 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
407 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
408
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000409- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
410 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
411 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
412 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
413 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
414 #897625.
415
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000416- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
417 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
418
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000419- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
420 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
421 and pops on either side of the deque.
422
423- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
424 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
425
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000426- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
427 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
428 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
429 other functions that expect a function argument.
430
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000431- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
432
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000433- os.getsid was added.
434
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000435- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
436 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
437 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
438
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000439- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
440
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000441- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
442
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000443- readline.clear_history was added.
444
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000445- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
446
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000447- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
448
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000449- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
450
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000451- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
452
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000453- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
454
455- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
456
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000457- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
458
459- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
460
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000461- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
462 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
463 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
464
465- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
466 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
467 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
468 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
469 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
470 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
471 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
472
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000473- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
474 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
475 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
476 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000477
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000478- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000479 iterators from a single iterable.
480
481- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
482 of raising a TypeError exception.
483
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000484- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
485 as parameter.
486
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000487Library
488-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000489
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000490- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
491 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
492 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000493
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000494- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
495 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
496 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000497
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000498- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000499
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000500- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
501 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000502
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000503- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
504 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
505
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000506- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
507
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000508- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000509 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000510
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000511- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
512 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
513
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000514- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
515
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000516- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
517 on cygwin and mingw32.
518
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000519- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
520
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000521- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
522 module.
523
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000524- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
525 installation scheme for all platforms.
526
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000527- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000528 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000529
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000530- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
531 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
532 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
533
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000534- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
535 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
536 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
537
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000538- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
539
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000540- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
541
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000542- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
543 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
544
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000545- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
546 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
547 type pattern with the same value exists.
548
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000549- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
550 when run from the command prompt).
551
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000552- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
553 not taken into consideration when caching value.
554
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000555- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
556 default sort).
557
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000558- Added global runctx function to profile module
559
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000560- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
561
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000562- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
563
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000564- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
565
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000566- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000567 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
568 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
569 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
570 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
571 accordingly.
572
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000573- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
574 decoding standards.
575
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000576- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
577 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
578 called for all requests.
579
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000580- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
581 they are passed to the compiler.
582
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000583- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
584 indent, width and depth.
585
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000586- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
587 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
588
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000589- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
590 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
591
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000592- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
593
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000594- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
595
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000596- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
597
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000598- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
599 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
600
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000601- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000602 for better performance.
603
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000604- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000605
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000606- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
607 a string).
608
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000609- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
610
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000611- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
612
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000613- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
614
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000615- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
616
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000617- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
618 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
619 list of fieldnames.
620
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000621- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
622 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
623
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000624- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
625
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000626- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
627 empty lists.
628
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000629- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
630 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
631 and shelves.
632
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000633- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
634 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
635
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000636- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000637 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
638 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000639
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000640- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
641 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000642 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000643
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000644- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000645 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
646 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
647
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000648- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
649 and removed in Py2.4.
650
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000651- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
652
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000653- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
654
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000655Tools/Demos
656-----------
657
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000658- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
659 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
660
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000661- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
662
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000663- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
664 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
665 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
666 destination in situations where both files are given.
667
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000668- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
669 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
670 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
671 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
672
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000673- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
674
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000675- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
676 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
677 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
678 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
679 now.
680
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000681- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
682 in effect
683
684- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
685 C-c C-h
686
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000687- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
688 -d option was given.
689
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000690Build
691-----
692
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000693- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
694 build under OS X.
695
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000696- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
697 --enable-profiling.
698
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000699- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
700 is configured --with-tsc.
701
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000702- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
703 on AMD64.
704
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000705- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
706 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
707
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000708- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
709 removed.
710
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000711- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
712 supported (see PEP 11).
713
714- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
715
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000716- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
717
718- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
719 (see PEP 11).
720
721- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
722 sizeof(char) must be 1.
723
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000724C API
725-----
726
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000727- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
728 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
729 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
730
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000731- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
732 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
733 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
734 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
735
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000736- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
737 generator objects.
738
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000739- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
740 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000741 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
742 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000743
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000744- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
745 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
746
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000747- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
748 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
749 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
750 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
751 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
752
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000753- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
754 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
755 about 10% faster.
756
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000757- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
758 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
759
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000760- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
761 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
762 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
763 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
764
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000765Windows
766-------
767
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000768- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
769 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
770 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
771 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
772
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000773- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
774 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
775 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
776
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000777
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000778What's New in Python 2.3 final?
779===============================
780
781*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
782
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000783IDLE
784----
785
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000786- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
787 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
788 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
789 context-menu actions.
790
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000791- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
792 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
793 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
794 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
795 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
796 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
797 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
798 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
799 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
800
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000801
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000802What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
803=============================================
804
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000805*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000806
807Core and builtins
808-----------------
809
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000810- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000811 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000812 comment at the end are still unsupported.
813
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000814Extension modules
815-----------------
816
817- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
818 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
819 than once. This has been fixed.
820
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000821- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
822 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
823 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
824 call.
825
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000826- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
827
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000828Library
829-------
830
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000831- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
832 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
833
834- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
835 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
836 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
837 restored.
838
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000839IDLE
840----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000841
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000842- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000843
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000844Build
845-----
846
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000847- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
848 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
849
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000850C API
851-----
852
853Windows
854-------
855
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000856- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
857 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
858
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000859- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
860
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000861Mac
862---
863
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000864- Various fixes to pimp.
865
866- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
867
868- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
869 more problems than it solves.
870
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000871
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000872What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
873=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000874
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000875*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
876
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000877Core and builtins
878-----------------
879
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000880- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
881 by sys.setcheckinterval().
882
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000883- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
884 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000885 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000886
887- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
888 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
889 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000890 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000891
892- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
893 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000894
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000895- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
896 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
897 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
898
899- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000900 770247.
901
902- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000903
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000904Extension modules
905-----------------
906
907- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
908 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
909
910- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
911
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000912- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
913
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000914- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
915 contained within the _strptime module.
916
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000917- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
918 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
919
920- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000921 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
922
923- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
924 the find_class attribute, if present.
925
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000926- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000927
928 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
929 (SF bug 763298).
930
931 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000932 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
933 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
934 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000935
936 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
937
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000938Library
939-------
940
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000941- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
942
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000943- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
944 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
945 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
946 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
947 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
948 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
949 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
950 or Tester().
951
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000952- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
953 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
954 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
955 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
956 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
957 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
958 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
959 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
960 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000961
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000962 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000963
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000964- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
965 weren't before was an oversight.
966
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000967- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
968 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
969
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000970- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
971 when there are no lines.
972
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000973- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
974 which could occur with Tk 8.4
975
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000976- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
977 to child processes.
978
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000979- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
980
981- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
982
983- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
984 xmlrpclib.
985
986- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
987 responses.
988
989- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
990 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
991
992- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
993 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
994 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
995
996- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
997 used as patterns.
998
999- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1000 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1001 than Tk 8.3.
1002
1003- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1004
1005- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001006
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001007Tools/Demos
1008-----------
1009
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001010- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1011
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001012- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1013
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001014- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001015
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001016Build
1017-----
1018
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001019- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1020
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001021- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1022
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001023- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1024 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001025
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001026- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1027 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1028 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001029
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001030C API
1031-----
1032
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001033- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1034 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1035
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001036Windows
1037-------
1038
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001039- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1040 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1041 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1042 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1043 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1044 Python exception ::
1045
1046 thread.error: can't start new thread
1047
1048 is raised now.
1049
1050- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1051 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1052 instead of from DLL teardown.
1053
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001054Mac
1055---
1056
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001057- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001058 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001059 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1060 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1061 the executable in the bundle.
1062
1063- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001064
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001065- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1066
1067- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1068 on Panther.
1069
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001070What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1071================================
1072
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001073*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001074
1075Core and builtins
1076-----------------
1077
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001078- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1079 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1080 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1081 with the -i option.
1082
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001083- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1084 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1085
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001086- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1087 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1088
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001089- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1090 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1091 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1092 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1093 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1094 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1095 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1096 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1097 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1098 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1099 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1100 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1101 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001102
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001103- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1104 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1105 embedded in a lambda expression.
1106
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001107- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1108 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1109 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1110 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1111 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1112
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001113- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1114 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1115 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1116
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001117- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1118 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1119
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001120- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1121 It's writable again.
1122
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001123- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1124 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1125 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001126 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001127
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001128- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1129 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1130 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1131
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001132Extension modules
1133-----------------
1134
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001135- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1136 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1137
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001138- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1139 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1140 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1141 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1142
1143- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1144 collection.
1145
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001146- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1147 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1148 unique within a single program run.
1149
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001150- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1151 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1152
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001153- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1154 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1155
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001156- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1157 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001158
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001159- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1160
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001161- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1162 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1163
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001164- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1165 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1166 for many BSD-derived systems.
1167
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001168
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001169Library
1170-------
1171
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001172- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1173 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1174 primary ones:
1175
1176 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1177 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1178 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1179
1180 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1181 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1182 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1183 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1184 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1185 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1186
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001187- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1188 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1189 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1190 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1191 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1192 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1193 argument.
1194
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001195- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1196 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1197 in the archive.
1198
1199- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1200 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1201
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001202- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1203 569574).
1204
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001205- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1206 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1207 no more.
1208
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001209- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1210 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1211 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1212 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1213 code coverage.
1214
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001215- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1216 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1217 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001218 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1219 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001220
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001221- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1222 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1223 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001224 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001225
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001226- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1227
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001228- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1229 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1230 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1231 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1232
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001233- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1234 handling.
1235
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001236- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1237 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1238
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001239- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1240 in socket.py.
1241
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001242- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1243
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001244- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1245 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1246 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1247 opener with proxy support.
1248
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001249- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1250
1251- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1252
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001253Tools/Demos
1254-----------
1255
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001256- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1257
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001258- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1259
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001260- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1261 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001262
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001263- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1264 files.
1265
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001266Build
1267-----
1268
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001269- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001270 different root directory.
1271
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001272C API
1273-----
1274
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001275- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1276 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1277 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1278 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1279 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1280 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1281 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1282 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1283 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1284 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1285
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001286- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1287 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1288 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1289 from Python.
1290
1291
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001292New platforms
1293-------------
1294
1295None this time.
1296
1297Tests
1298-----
1299
1300- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1301 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1302
1303Windows
1304-------
1305
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001306- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1307
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001308- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1309 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1310 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1311 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1312 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1313 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1314 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1315 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1316 that's what it's for.
1317
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001318Mac
1319---
1320
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001321- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1322 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1323 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1324 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001325- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1326 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1327- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001328
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001329SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1330------------------------------------
1331
1332430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1333598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1334622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1335661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1336683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1337697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1338713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1339724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1340727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1341729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1342730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1343731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1344732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1345733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1346735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1347740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1348744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1349745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1350747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1351749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1352751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1353753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1354755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1355757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1356760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1357
1358
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001359What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1360================================
1361
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001362*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001363
1364Core and builtins
1365-----------------
1366
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001367- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1368 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1369
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001370- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1371 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1372 and cannot be strings).
1373
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001374- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1375 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1376 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1377 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1378
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001379- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1380 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1381 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1382 Python itself.
1383
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001384- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1385 the referenced object, if it has one.
1386
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001387- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1388 the thread started at
1389 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1390
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001391- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1392 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1393 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1394 placed on a list index.
1395
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001396- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1397 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1398 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1399 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1400
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001401- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1402 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1403 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1404 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1405 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1406 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1407 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1408
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001409- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1410 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1411 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1412 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1413 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1414
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001415- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1416 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001417
1418- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1419 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1420 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1421 #693195.)
1422
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001423- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1424 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001425
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001426- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001427 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001428 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1429 interpreter executions, would fail.
1430
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001431- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001432 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001433 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001434
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001435Extension modules
1436-----------------
1437
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001438- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1439 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1440 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1441 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1442
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001443- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1444 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1445
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001446- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1447 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1448 and Greg Chapman.)
1449
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001450- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1451 recursively.
1452
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001453- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001454 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1455 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1456 leaks.
1457
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001458- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1459
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001460- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1461 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1462 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1463 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1464 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1465 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1466 #705836.
1467
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001468- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001469 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1470
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001471- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1472 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1473 See SF bug #692416.
1474
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001475- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1476 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1477
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001478- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1479 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1480 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001481
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001482- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001483 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1484 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1485
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001486- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1487 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1488 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1489 timeouts to work properly.
1490
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001491Library
1492-------
1493
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001494- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1495 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1496 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1497 future release.
1498
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001499- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1500 for querying platform dependent features.
1501
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001502- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001503
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001504- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1505 pickle protocol versions.
1506
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001507- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1508 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1509 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1510
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001511- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1512
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001513- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1514 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1515 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1516 modules.
1517
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001518- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1519 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1520 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1521
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001522- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1523 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1524
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001525- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1526 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1527 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1528
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001529- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001530 MS Office extensions.
1531
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001532- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1533 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1534
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001535- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1536 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1537
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001538- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1539 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1540 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1541 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1542 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1543 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1544
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001545- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1546 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1547 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001548
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001549- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1550 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1551 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1552
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001553- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1554
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001555- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1556 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1557 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1558
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001559Tools/Demos
1560-----------
1561
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001562- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1563 See the module docstring for details.
1564
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001565Build
1566-----
1567
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001568- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1569 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001570
1571C API
1572-----
1573
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001574- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1575
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001576- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1577 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1578 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1579
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001580- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1581 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001582
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001583 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1584 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1585 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001586
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001587- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001588 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1589
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001590- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1591 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1592 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001593
1594New platforms
1595-------------
1596
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001597None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001598
1599Tests
1600-----
1601
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001602- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1603 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001604
1605Windows
1606-------
1607
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001608- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1609 function.
1610
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001611- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1612 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001613
1614Mac
1615---
1616
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001617- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1618 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001619
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001620- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1621 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001622
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001623- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1624 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1625 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001626
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001627- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001628 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1629 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001630
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001631- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1632 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001633
1634
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001635What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1636=================================
1637
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001638*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001639
1640Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001641-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001642
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001643- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1644 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1645 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1646
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001647- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1648 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1649 (SF patch #664376.)
1650
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001651- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1652 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1653 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1654 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1655 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1656 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001657 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001658
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001659- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1660 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1661 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1662 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001663 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001664
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001665- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1666 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1667 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1668 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1669 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1670 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1671 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1672 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1673 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1674 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1675 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1676
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001677- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1678 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1679 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1680 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1681 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1682 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1683
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001684- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1685 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1686
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001687- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1688 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1689 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1690 case.)
1691
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001692- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1693 passed as unicode strings.
1694
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001695- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1696 See SF bug #683467.
1697
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001698- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1699 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1700
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001701- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1702
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001703- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1704
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001705- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1706 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1707 arguments.
1708
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001709- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1710 See SF bug #667147.
1711
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001712- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001713 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001714 See SF bug #676155.
1715
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001716- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001717 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001718 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1719 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1720 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1721 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1722 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1723 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001724
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001725Extension modules
1726-----------------
1727
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001728- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1729 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1730 tp_as_number pointer.
1731
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001732- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1733 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1734 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1735 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1736 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1737
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001738- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1739
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001740- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1741
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001742- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001743 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001744 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1745 patch #678531.)
1746
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001747- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1748 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1749
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001750- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1751 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1752
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001753- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1754
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001755- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1756 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1757 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1758
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001759- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1760
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001761- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1762 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1763
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001764- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001765
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001766- datetime changes:
1767
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001768 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1769
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001770 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1771 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1772 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1773 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1774 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1775 now.
1776
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001777 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001778 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1779 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001780
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001781 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001782 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001783 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1784 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1785 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1786 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001787
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001788 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1789 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1790 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001791 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1792
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001793 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1794 by a later example coded by Guido.
1795
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001796 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001797 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1798 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1799 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001800 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1801 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1802
1803 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1804 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1805 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1806 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1807 tzinfo subclass instance.
1808
1809 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1810 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1811 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1812 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1813 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1814 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1815 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1816 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001817
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001818 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1819 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1820 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1821 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1822 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001823 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1824
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001825 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001826
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001827 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1828 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1829 as a naive datetime object.
1830
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001831 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1832 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1833 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1834
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001835 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1836 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1837 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1838 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1839 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1840 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1841 comparison.
1842
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001843 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1844 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1845 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1846 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001847 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001848
1849 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001850
1851 and ::
1852
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001853 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1854
1855 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1856 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1857 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1858 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1859
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001860 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1861 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1862 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1863 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1864 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1865
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001866 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1867 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001868 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1869 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001870
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001871Library
1872-------
1873
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001874- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1875 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1876
1877- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1878 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1879 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1880 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1881 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1882 See PEP 307 for details.
1883
1884- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1885 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1886
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001887- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1888 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001889 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001890 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1891 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001892 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001893
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001894- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1895 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1896
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001897- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1898 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1899 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1900
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001901- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1902
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001903- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1904 exception.
1905
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001906- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1907 class.
1908
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001909- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1910 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1911 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1912
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001913- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1914 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1915
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001916- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001917 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1918 See SF bug #659228.
1919
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001920- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1921 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1922 See SF patch #651082.
1923
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001924- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001925
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001926- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1927 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1928
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001929- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001930 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001931
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001932- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1933 DOS paths from other platforms.
1934
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001935Tools/Demos
1936-----------
1937
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001938- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1939 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1940 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1941 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1942 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1943 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1944 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1945 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1946 example:
1947
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001948 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1949 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001950
1951 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1952
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001953
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001954Build
1955-----
1956
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001957- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1958 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1959 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001960 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1961
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001962 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1963
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001964- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1965 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1966 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1967 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1968 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1969 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1970 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1971 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1972 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1973
1974- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1975 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1976 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1977 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1978
1979- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1980 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1981
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001982C API
1983-----
1984
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001985- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1986 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001987
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001988- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1989 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1990 tp_as_number pointer.
1991
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001992- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1993 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1994 (SF #681367)
1995
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001996- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1997 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1998 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1999 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002000
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002001Tests
2002-----
2003
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002004- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002005 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2006 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2007 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2008 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2009 pydoc.)
2010
2011- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2012
2013- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002014
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002015Windows
2016-------
2017
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002018- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2019 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2020 time).
2021
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002022- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2023 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2024
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002025- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2026 release without strong cryptography.
2027
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002028- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002029 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002030
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002031- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2032 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2033
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002034Mac
2035---
2036
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002037- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2038 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002039
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002040- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2041 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2042 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002043
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002044- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2045 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002046
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002047- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2048 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2049 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2050 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002051
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002052- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002053 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2054 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2055 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002056
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002057
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002058What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002059=================================
2060
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002061*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002062
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002063Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002064--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002065
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002066- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2067
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002068- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2069 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002070 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002071 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002072 a different meaning than before.
2073
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002074- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002075 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002076 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002077
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002078- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002079 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002080 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002081
2082- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2083 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2084 and deallocation.
2085
2086- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2087 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2088
2089- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2090 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2091 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2092 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2093 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2094
2095- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2096 now detected by the garbage collector.
2097
2098- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2099 [SF bug 519621]
2100
2101- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2102 identifier.
2103
2104- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2105 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2106 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2107 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2108 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2109 [SF bug 563060]
2110
2111- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2112 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2113 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2114 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2115 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2116
2117- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2118 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2119 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2120
2121- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2122
2123- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2124 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2125 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2126 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2127 state of the slots would be lost.)
2128
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002129Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002130-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002131
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002132- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002133 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2134 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2135 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2136 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002137 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2138 Jython 2.1.
2139
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002140- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002141 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002142 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2143 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2144 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2145 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2146 these, see PEP 302.
2147
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002148- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2149 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2150 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2151
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002152- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2153 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2154 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2155
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002156- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2157 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2158 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2159
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002160- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2161 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2162 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2163 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2164 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2165 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2166 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2167 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2168 releases or implementations.
2169
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002170- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002171 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2172 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002173
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002174- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2175 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2176
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002177- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2178 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2179 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2180
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002181- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2182 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2183
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002184- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2185 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002186 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2187 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002188
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002189- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2190 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2191 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2192 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2193 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2194
2195 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2196 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2197 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2198 pattern.
2199
2200 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2201 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2202 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2203 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2204
2205 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2206 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2207 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2208 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2209 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2210 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2211
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002212- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2213 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2214 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2215 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2216 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2217 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2218 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2219 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002220
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002221- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2222 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2223 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2224 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2225 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002226 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2227 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2228 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2229 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2230 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2231 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2232 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002233
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002234- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2235 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2236
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002237- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2238 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2239 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2240 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2241 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2242 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2243 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2244 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2245 to Zack Weinberg!
2246
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002247- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2248 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2249 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2250 type. This has been fixed now.
2251
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002252- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2253 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2254 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2255
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002256- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2257 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2258 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2259 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2260 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2261 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2262 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2263 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002264 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002265
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002266- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2267 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2268 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002269
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002270- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2271 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2272 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2273 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2274 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2275 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2276 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2277 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002278 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002279 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2280 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2281
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002282- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2283 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2284 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2285 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2286 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2287 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2288 this.)
2289
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002290- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2291 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002292 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002293 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002294 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2295 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002296 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2297 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002298
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002299- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2300 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2301 currently running.
2302
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002303- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2304 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2305 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2306 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2307
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002308- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2309 as directory names.
2310
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002311- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2312 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2313
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002314- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2315 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2316
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002317- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002318 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2319 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002320
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002321- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2322 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2323 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2324 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2325 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2326
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002327- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2328 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2329 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2330 removed.
2331
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002332- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2333 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2334 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2335
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002336- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2337 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2338 to __debug__.
2339
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002340- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2341 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2342 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2343
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002344- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2345 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2346 deprecated now.
2347
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002348- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2349 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2350 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002351
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002352- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2353 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2354 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2355 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2356 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002357
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002358- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2359 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2360
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002361- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2362 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2363 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002364 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002365 is backward compatible.
2366
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002367- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2368 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2369 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2370 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2371 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2372
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002373- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2374 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2375 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2376 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2377 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2378 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002379
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002380- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2381 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2382
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002383- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2384 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2385
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002386- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2387 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2388 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2389 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2390 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2391
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002392- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2393 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2394 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2395
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002396- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002397 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2398
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002399- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2400 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2401 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002402
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002403- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2404 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2405
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002406- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2407 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2408 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2409
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002410- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2411
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002412Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002413-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002414
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002415- Added three operators to the operator module:
2416 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2417 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2418 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2419
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002420- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2421
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002422- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2423 archives.
2424
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002425- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2426 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2427 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2428
2429 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2430
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002431- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2432 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2433 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002434 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002435
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002436- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2437 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2438 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2439 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002440 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2441 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2442 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2443 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002444
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002445- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2446 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002447
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002448- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2449
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002450- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2451 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2452
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002453- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2454 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2455 supported.
2456
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002457- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2458
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002459- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2460 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002461
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002462- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2463 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2464
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002465- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2466
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002467- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2468 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2469
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002470- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2471 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2472 functions but callable type objects.
2473
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002474- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002475 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002476 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002477
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002478- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2479 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002480
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002481- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2482 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002483
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002484- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2485 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2486 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2487 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2488
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002489- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2490 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002491
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002492- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2493 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2494 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2495 and __imul__.
2496
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002497- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002498 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2499 is called.
2500
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002501- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2502 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2503 interpreter was compiled.
2504
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002505- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2506 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2507 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002508 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002509 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2510 1, not 2.
2511
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002512- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2513 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2514 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2515 limit.
2516
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002517- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2518 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2519 bug #623464.
2520
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002521- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2522 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2523 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2524 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2525
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002526Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002527-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002528
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002529- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2530
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002531- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2532 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2533 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2534 with Python 2.3a2.
2535
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002536- os.path exposes getctime.
2537
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002538- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002539 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002540 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002541 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002542 unit tests of floating point results.
2543
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002544- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2545 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2546 has been increased.
2547
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002548- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2549 executed.
2550
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002551- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2552 postinstallation script.
2553
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002554- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2555 test the current module.
2556
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002557- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002558 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2559 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2560 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2561 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2562
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002563- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002564 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002565 Ward's Optik package.
2566
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002567- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2568 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2569 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2570 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2571
2572- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2573 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002574 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002575
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002576- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2577 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2578 shelf are binary pickles.
2579
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002580- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2581 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2582
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002583- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2584 modules are iterators now.
2585
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002586- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2587 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2588 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2589 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2590 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2591 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002592
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002593- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2594 with their entity value.
2595
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002596- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2597
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002598- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2599 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002600
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002601- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2602 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002603 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002604
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002605- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2606 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2607 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2608 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2609 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2610 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2611 main():
2612
2613 import locale
2614 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2615
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002616- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2617 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2618
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002619- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2620 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2621 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2622 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2623 to the new standard.
2624
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002625- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2626 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2627 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2628 an extension to the database.
2629
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002630- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2631 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2632 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2633 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002634 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002635
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002636- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002637 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002638
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002639- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2640 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2641 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2642 bounded integers.
2643
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002644- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2645 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2646 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2647 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2648 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2649 in existence.
2650
2651 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2652 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2653 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2654 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2655 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2656 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2657
2658 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2659 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2660 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2661 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2662
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002663- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2664 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2665 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2666
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002667- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2668
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002669- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2670 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2671 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2672 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2673
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002674- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2675 argument.
2676
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002677- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2678 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2679 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2680 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2681 [SF patch 560794].
2682
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002683- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2684 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2685 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002686 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2687 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2688 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002689
2690- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2691 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002692
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002693- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2694 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2695 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2696 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002697
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002698- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2699 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2700 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2701 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2702 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2703
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002704- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002705
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002706- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2707
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002708- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2709 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2710 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2711 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2712 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2713 identical to None.
2714
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002715- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2716 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2717 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2718 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2719 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2720 results now.
2721
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002722- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2723 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2724
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002725- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2726 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2727 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2728 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2729 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2730 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2731 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2732 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2733
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002734- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2735
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002736- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2737 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2738
2739- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2740 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2741 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2742 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2743 and other systems.
2744
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002745- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2746 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2747 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2748 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 +00002749 work well with these.
2750
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002751- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2752
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002753- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002754 connections.
2755
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002756- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2757 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2758 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2759
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002760- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2761 sets
2762
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002763- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2764 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2765 name.
2766
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002767- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2768 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2769 passed in.
2770
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002771- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002772 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002773 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2774 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002775
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002776- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2777
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002778- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2779
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002780- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2781 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2782 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2783
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002784- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2785 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2786 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2787 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002788 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002789
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002790- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002791 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002792 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002793
2794- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2795 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2796 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2797
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002798- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002799 the value of its expression argument.
2800
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002801- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2802 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2803 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2804
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002805- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2806 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2807 skipstone browser was included.
2808
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002809- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2810 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2811
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002812Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002813-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002814
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002815- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2816 names in addition to accepting file names.
2817
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002818- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2819 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2820 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2821 still used and useful.)
2822
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002823- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2824 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2825 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2826 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002827
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002828- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2829 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2830 the generated binary.
2831
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002832Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002833-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002834
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002835- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2836
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002837- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2838 except in the hands of experts.
2839
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002840- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002841 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2842 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2843 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002844
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002845- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2846 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2847 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2848 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2849 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2850 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2851 builds.
2852
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002853- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2854 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2855 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2856 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2857 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2858 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2859 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2860 new type.
2861
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002862- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002863
2864 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2865 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2866 positive infinities.
2867
2868 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2869 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2870 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2871 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2872 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2873 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2874 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2875
2876 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2877
2878 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2879
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002880- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2881 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2882 size of the executable.
2883
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002884- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2885 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2886 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2887 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002888
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002889- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2890
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002891- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2892 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2893 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002894
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002895- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2896 well as Unix.
2897
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002898- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2899 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2900 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2901 modules in the README file for details.
2902
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002903C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002904-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002905
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002906- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2907 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002908 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002909 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002910 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002911
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002912- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2913 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2914 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2915 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2916 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2917 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002918 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002919 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2920 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2921 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2922 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2923 aligned.)
2924
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002925- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2926 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2927 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2928
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002929- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2930 level.
2931
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002932- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2933 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2934 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2935 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2936 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2937
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002938- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2939 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2940 code.
2941
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002942- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2943 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2944 adjusting for negative indices.
2945
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002946- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2947 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2948 object.
2949
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002950- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2951 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2952 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2953
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002954- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2955 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002956
2957- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2958
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002959- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2960 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2961 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2962 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2963
2964- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2965
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002966- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002967
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002968- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002969 without going through the buffer API.
2970
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002971- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002972
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002973- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2974 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2975 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2976 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2977
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002978- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2979 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2980
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002981- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002982 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2983
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002984New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002986
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002987- OpenVMS is now supported.
2988
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002989- AtheOS is now supported.
2990
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002991- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2992
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002993- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2994
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002995Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002996-----
2997
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002998- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2999 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3000 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003001
3002Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003003-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003004
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003005- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3006 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3007 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3008 bugs.
3009 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003010 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003011 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3012 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003013 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003014
3015- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003016 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003017
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003018- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3019 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3020
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003021- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3022 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003023 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003024 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3025
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003026- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3027 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3028 use files" uninstall option).
3029
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003030- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3031
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003032- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3033 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3034
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003035- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3036 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3037 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3038
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003039- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3040 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3041 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3042 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3043 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003044 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3045 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3046 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003047
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003048- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003049 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003050 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3051 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3052 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3053 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3054 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3055 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3056 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3057 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3058 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3059 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3060 work around.
3061
3062- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3063 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3064 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3065 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3066 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3067 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3068 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3069 specified with O_CREAT too).
3070
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003071Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003072----
3073
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003074- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003075
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003076- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3077 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3078 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3079
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003080- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3081 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3082 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3083
3084- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3085 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3086 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3087 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3088 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3089 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3090 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3091 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003092
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003093- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3094 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3095 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003096
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003097- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3098 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3099 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3100 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3101 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003102
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003103- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3104 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3105 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003106
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003107- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3108 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003109
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003110- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3111 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3112 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3113 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3114 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003115
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003116- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3117 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3118 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3119
3120- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3121 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3122 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003123
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003124- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3125 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3126 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3127 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003128 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003129
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003130- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3131 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003132
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003133- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3134 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003135
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003136- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003137 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003138 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3139 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003140
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003141
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003142What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003143===============================
3144
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3146
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003147Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003148--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003149
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003150- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3151 with a custom metaclass.
3152
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003153Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003155
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003156- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3157 are proxies.
3158
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003159Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003161
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003162- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3163 very short strings.
3164
3165- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3166 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3167 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3168 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3169 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3170
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003171Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003172-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003173
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003174- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3175 close or delete time).
3176
3177- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3178 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3179
3180- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3181
3182- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003183 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003184
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003185Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003186-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003187
3188Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003190
3191C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003193
3194New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003196
3197Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003198-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003199
3200Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003201-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003202
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003203- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3204
3205- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3206 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3207
3208- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3209 deleted at process exit time.
3210
3211- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3212 in backslash.
3213
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003214Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003216
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003217- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3218 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3219 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3220
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003221
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003222What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003223===========================
3224
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3226
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003227Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003229
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003230- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3231 been extensively updated. See
3232
3233 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3234
3235 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3236
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003237- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3238 deleted!
3239
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003240- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3241 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3242 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3243 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3244 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3245
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003246- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3247
3248 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3249 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3250
3251 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3252 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3253 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3254 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3255 supported anyway.
3256
3257 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3258 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3259
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003260- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3261 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3262 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3263 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3264 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003265
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003266- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3267 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3268 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3269
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003270Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003272
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003273- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3274 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3275 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3276 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3277 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3278 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003279 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3280 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3281 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3282 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003283
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003284- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3285 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3286 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3287
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003288Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003289-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003290
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003291- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3292
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003293Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003294-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003295
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003296- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3297 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3298 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3299 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3300 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3301 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3302
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003303- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3304
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003305- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3306
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003307- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3308
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003309- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3310 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3311 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3312
3313- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3314
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003315Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003317
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003318- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3319 off a search on Google.
3320
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003321Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003323
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003324- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3325 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3326 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3327 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3328 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3329 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3330 other platforms should do likewise.
3331
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003332- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3333 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3334 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3335
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003336C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003338
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003339- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3340 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3341 producing key-value pairs.
3342
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003343- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003344 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003345 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3346 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3347 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3348 previously went unchallenged.
3349
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003350New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003351-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003352
3353Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003355
3356Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003358
3359Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003360----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003361
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003362- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3363 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003364
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003365- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3366 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3367 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3368 home.
3369
3370
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003371What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003372===========================
3373
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003374*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3375
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003376Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003377--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003378
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003379- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3380 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003381
3382 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003383 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003384
3385 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3386 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003387 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003388 This needs to be documented.
3389
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003390- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3391 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3392
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003393- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3394 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3395 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3396
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003397- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3398 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3399
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003400- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3401 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3402 class forbids it).
3403
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003404- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3405 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3406 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3407
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003408- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3409
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003410Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003411-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003412
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003413- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3414 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003415 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003416
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003417- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3418 (like 1 + '').
3419
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003420Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003421-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003422
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003423- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3424 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3425 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3426 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003427 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003428 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3429
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003430- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3431 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3432 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3433 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3434
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003435- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3436 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003437 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3438 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3439 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003440
3441- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3442 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003443
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003444- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3445 bytes on its input.
3446
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003447Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003448-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003449
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003450- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003451 convenience function.
3452
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003453- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3454 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3455 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003456 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3457 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3458 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3459 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3460 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3461 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003462
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003463- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3464 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3465 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3466 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3467
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003468- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3469 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3470 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3471
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003472- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3473 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3474 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3475 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3476
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003477- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3478 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003480 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3481 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3482 new -l and -e options.
3483
3484- statcache is now deprecated.
3485
3486- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3487 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003489 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3490 time properly taken into account.
3491
3492- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3493 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3494 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3495 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3496
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003497Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003498-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003499
3500Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003501-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003502
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003503- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3504 is built with libdb3 if available.
3505
3506- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3507
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003508C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003509-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003510
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003511- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3512 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3513 PySequence_Size().
3514
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003515- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3516
3517- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3518 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3519 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3520
3521- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3522 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3523
3524- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3525 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3526
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003527New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003529
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003530- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3531 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3532
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003533- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3534 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3535
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003536- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3537
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003538Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003540
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003541- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3542 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3543
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003544Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003546
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003547Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003549
3550- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3551 removed completely in the next release.
3552
3553- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3554 OSX.
3555
3556- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3557 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3558
3559- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3560
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003561
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003562What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003563===========================
3564
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003565*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3566
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003567Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003569
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003570- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003571 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003572 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003573 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3574 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003575 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3576 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003577 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3578 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003579
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003580- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3581 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3582
3583- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3584 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3585
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003586Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003587-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003588
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003589- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3590 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3591 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3592 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3593 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3594 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3595 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3596 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3597
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003598- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3599 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3600 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3601 example).
3602
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003603- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003604 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003605 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003606 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003607
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003608- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3609 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3610 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003611 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003612
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003613- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3614 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3615 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3616 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3617 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3618 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3619
3620 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3621
3622 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3623
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003624Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003626
3627- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3628
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003629- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3630
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003631- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3632 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003633
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003634- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3635 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3636 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3637 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3638 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3639 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003640 attributes.
3641
3642- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3643 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3644 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003645
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003646- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3647 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3648 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003649
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003650- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3651 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3652 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003653 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3654 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3655
3656- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3657 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003658
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003659Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003660-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003661
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003662- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3663 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3664
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003665- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3666 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3667 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3668 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3669
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003670- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3671 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3672 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3673 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3674
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003675 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3676 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3677 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3678 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3679 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3680 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3681 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3682 without losing information).
3683
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003684- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003685 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3686 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3687 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3688 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3689 module).
3690
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003691 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003692 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3693 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3694 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3695 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003696
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003697- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003698 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3699 encoding.
3700
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003701- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3702 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3703
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003705 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3706
3707- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3708 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3709 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3710 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3711
3712- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3713
3714- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3715 ON, and OFF.
3716
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003717- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3718 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3719
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003720Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003721-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003722
3723- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3724 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3725 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003726
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003727- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3728 been added: -X and -E.
3729
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003730Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003731-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003732
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003733- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3734 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3735
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003736C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003738
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003739- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3740 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3741 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3742 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3743 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3744
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003745- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3746 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3747 as long) arguments.
3748
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003749- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3750 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3751 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3752 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3753 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3754 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3755
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003756- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3757 input.
3758
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003759New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003761
3762Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003764
3765Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003767
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003768- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3769 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3770 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3771
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003772- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3773 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3774 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003775 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003776
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3778 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3779 import signal
3780 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003781
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003783 while 1:
3784 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003786 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3787 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3788 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3789 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003790
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003791
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003792What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3793===========================
3794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003795*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3796
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003797Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003798--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003799
3800- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3801 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3802 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3803
3804- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3805 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3806 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3807 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3808 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3809 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3810 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003811
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003812- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003813 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003814 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3815 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3816 associate a docstring with a property.
3817
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003818- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3819 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3820 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3821 other built-in object types.
3822
3823- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3824 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3825 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3826 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3827 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3828
3829- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3830 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3831
3832- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3833 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003834 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003835 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3836 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3837 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3838 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3839 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3840
3841- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3842 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3843 class.
3844
3845- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3846 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3847 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3848 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3849
3850- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3851 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3852 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3853 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3854
3855- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3856 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3857
3858- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3859 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3860 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3861 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3862 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003863 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003864 with the same value as s.
3865
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003866- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3867
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003868Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003870
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003871- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3872
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003873- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3874 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3875 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3876 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3877 objects.
3878
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003879- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3880 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003881 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3882 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3883
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003884- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3885 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3886 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3887
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003888Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003889-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003890
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003891- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3892 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3893 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3894 by the instances.
3895
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003896- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3897 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3898 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3899
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003900- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3901 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3902 before the entire comparison is complete.
3903
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003904- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3905 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3906 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3907
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003908- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3909 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3910 getwriter().
3911
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003912- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3913 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3914
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003915- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003916 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3917 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3918
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003919- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3920 iterable object.
3921
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003922- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3923 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003924
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003925- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3926 authentication.
3927
3928- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3929 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003930
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003931- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003932 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3933 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3934 a sample driver.)
3935
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003936Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003938
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003939- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3940 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3941 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3942 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3943 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3944 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3945 kernel has large file support.
3946
3947- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3948 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3949 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3950 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3951 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3952
3953- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3954 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3955 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3956
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003957C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003958-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003959
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003960- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3961 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3962
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003963New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003965
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003966- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3967 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3968
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003969Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003970-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003971
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003972- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3973 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3974 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3975 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3976 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3977
3978- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3979 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3980 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3981 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3982
3983- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3984 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3985
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003986Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003988
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003989- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003990 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3991 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003992
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003993
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003994What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3995===========================
3996
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3998
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003999Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004001
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004002- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4003 big to represent as a C double.
4004
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004005- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4006 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4007 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4008 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4009 restriction).
4010
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004011- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4012 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4013 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4014 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4015 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4016
4017 >>> dir([])
4018 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4019 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4020 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4021 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4022 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4023 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4024 'reverse', 'sort']
4025
4026 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4027
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004028- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004029 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4030 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4031 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4032 OverflowError exception.
4033
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004034- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004035 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004036 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4037 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4038 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4039 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4040 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004041 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4043 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4044
4045 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4046 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4047 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4048 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004049
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004050- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004051 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4052 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4053 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4054 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4055 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4056 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4057 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4058 once it is created.
4059
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004060- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4061 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4062 (key, value) pairs.
4063
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004064- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004065 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4066 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4067
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004068- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4069 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4070 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4071 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4072 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004073
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004074- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004075 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4076 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4077
4078 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4079
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004080- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004081 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4082
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004083Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004085
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004086- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004087 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4088 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004089
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004090- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4091 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4092 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4093 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4094 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4095 in this area anymore).
4096
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004097- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4098 threading.Timer.
4099
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004100- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4101 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4102
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004103- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004104 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4105
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004106- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004107 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4108 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4109 converted to Python longs.
4110
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004111- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004112 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4113
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004114- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4115 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4116 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4117
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004118Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004120
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004121- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4122 division operators as per PEP 238.
4123
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004124Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004126
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004127- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4128 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4129 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4130 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4131
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004132C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004133-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004134
4135- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004136
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004137- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4138 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004139 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004140
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4142 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004143 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004145
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004146- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004147 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4148 module:
4149
4150 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004151
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004152 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4153 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004154
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004155 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4156 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004157
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004158 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4159
4160 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4161
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004162- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004163 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4164 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4165 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004166
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004167New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004169
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004170- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4171 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4172 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4173 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4174 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004175
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004176Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004178
4179Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004180-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004181
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004182- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4183 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4184 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4185 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004186 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4187 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4188 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4189 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4190 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004191
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004192- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004193 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4194
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004195
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004196What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4197===========================
4198
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4200
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004201Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004203
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004204- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4205 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4206
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004207- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4208 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4209 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004210
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004211- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4212 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4213 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4214 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004215
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004216- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4217
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004219
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004220Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004222
4223- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004224 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004225 the module docstring for details.
4226
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004227Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004229
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004230- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004231 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4232 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4233 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004234
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004235- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4236 Nick Mathewson.
4237
4238Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004240
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004241- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4242 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4243 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4244 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4245 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4246 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4247 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4248 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4249
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004250- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4251 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4252 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4253 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4254
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004255- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4256 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4257 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4258 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4259 come a long way).
4260
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004261- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4262 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4263 write filters for these warnings).
4264
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004265- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4266 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4267 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4268 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4269 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4270
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004271- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4272 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4273 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4274 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4275 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4276 older distribution.
4277
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004278Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004280
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004281- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4282 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004283 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004284
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004285- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4286 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4287 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4288
4289- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4290
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004291- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4292
4293- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4294
4295- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4296
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004298
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004299- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4300
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004301New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004303
4304C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004306
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004307- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4308 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4309 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4310 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4311 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4312 against buffer overruns.
4313
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004314- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004315 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4316 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004317 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4318 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4319 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4320
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004321- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4322 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4323 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4324 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4325 deprecated.
4326
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004327Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004329
4330- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4331 relevant is found.
4332
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004333
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004334What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004335===========================
4336
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4338
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004339Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004341
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004342- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4343 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4344 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4345 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4346 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4347 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4348 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4349 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004350 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004351 repaired.
4352
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004353- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004354 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004355 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4356 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4357 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4358 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4359 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4360 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4361 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4362 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4363
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004364- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4365 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4366 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4367 leading BMO character).
4368
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004369- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4370 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4371 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4372
4373 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4374 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4375 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004376
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004377 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4378 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4379 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4380 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4381 for various simple to use conversions.
4382
4383 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4384 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4385
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4387 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4388 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4389 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4390 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4391 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4392 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4393 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4394 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4395 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4396 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4397 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4398 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4399 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4400 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004401
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004402- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4403 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4404 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004405 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004406 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004407
4408 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004409 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4410 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4411 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4412 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4413 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004414 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4415 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004416
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004417 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4418 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4419 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004420 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004421
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004422- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4423 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4424 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4425 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4426 floating arithmetic,
4427
4428 x = 9007199254740992.0
4429 print long(x)
4430
4431 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4432 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4433 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4434 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4435 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4436 functions are of good quality).
4437
4438 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4439 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4440 algorithms to break.
4441
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004442- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4443 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4444 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4445 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4446 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4447 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4448 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4449 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4450 order.
4451
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004452- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4453 operation along the most common code paths.
4454
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004455- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4456 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4457
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004458- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4459 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4460 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4461 {}.update(UserDict())
4462
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004463- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4464 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4465 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4466 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4467 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4468 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4469 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4470 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4471
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004472- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004473 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004474
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004475 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004476 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4477 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004478 join() method of strings
4479 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004480 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4481 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004483 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004484
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004485- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4486 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4487
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004488- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4489 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4490
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004491- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4492 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4493 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4494 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4495
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004496- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4497 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004498 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004499 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4500 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004501
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004502- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4503
4504
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004505Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004507
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004508- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004509 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004510 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4511 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4512
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004513- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4514 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4515
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004516- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4517 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4518 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4519 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4520
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004521- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4522 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4523 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4524
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004525- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4526
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004527- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4528
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004529- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4530 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4531 that are still imported into string.py).
4532
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004533- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4534
4535- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4536 Now it does.
4537
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004538- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4539
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004540- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4541 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4542 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4543 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4544 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004545 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4546 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004547
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004548- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4549 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4550 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4551 'help(object)'.
4552
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004553Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004554-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004555
4556- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004557 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004558 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4559 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4560
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004561- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004562 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4563 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004564
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004565C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004566-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004567
4568- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4569 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570
4571----
4572
4573**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**