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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
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4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000015- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
16 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
17
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000018- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
19
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000020- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
21
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000022- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
23 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
24
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000025- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
26 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
27 Fixes bug #858016 .
28
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000029- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
30 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
31 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
32
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000033- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
34 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
35 improves their performance (about 35%).
36
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000037- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
38 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
39 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
40
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000041- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
42 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
43 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
44 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
45
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000046- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
47 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
48 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
49 length is not known).
50
51- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
52 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000053 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
54 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000055 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
56
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000057- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
58 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
59
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000060- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
61 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
62 keyword arguments.
63
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000064- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
65 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
66 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
67
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000068- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
69 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
70 cases.
71
72- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
73 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
74 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
75 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
76 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
77 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
78 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
79 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
80 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
81 a release build.
82
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000083- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
84 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
85
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000086- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000087 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000088
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000089- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
90 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
91 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
92 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
93 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
94 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
95 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
96 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
97 destroyed.
98
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000099- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
100 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
101 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
102 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
103 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
104 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
105 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
106 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
107
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000108- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
109 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
110 character other than a space.
111
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000112- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
113 by the function object or by the method object, the function
114 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
115 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
116 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
117 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
118 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
119 attributes with the same name.
120
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000121- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
122 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
123 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
124 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
125 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
126 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
127 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
128 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
129 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
130 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
131 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
132 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
133 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
134 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000135
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000136- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
137 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
138 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
139 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
140 This has been repaired.
141
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000142- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
143
144- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
145
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000146- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
147 over a sequence.
148
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000149- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
150 from any iterable.
151
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000152- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
153
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000154- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
155 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
156 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
157 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
158 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
159 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
160 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
161 records with equal keys is unchanged).
162
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000163- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
164 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
165 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
166
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000167- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
168 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
169 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
170 freelist.
171
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000172- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
173 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
174
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000175- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
176 number.
177
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000178- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
179 a TypeError exception.
180
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000181- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
182 820195.
183
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000184- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
185 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
186 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
187
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000188- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
189 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
190 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000191
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000192- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
193 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
194 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
195
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000196- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
197 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
198 method is called as necessary.
199
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000200- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
201 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
202 the first call.
203
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000204
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000205Extension modules
206-----------------
207
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000208- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
209 fewer false positives.
210
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000211- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
212 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
213
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000214- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
215 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
216
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000217- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
218 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000219 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
220 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
221 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000222
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000223- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
224 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
225 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
226 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
227
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000228- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
229 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
230 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
231 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
232 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
233 #897625.
234
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000235- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
236 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
237
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000238- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
239 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
240 and pops on either side of the deque.
241
242- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
243 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
244
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000245- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
246 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
247 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
248 other functions that expect a function argument.
249
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000250- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
251
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000252- os.getsid was added.
253
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000254- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
255 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
256 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
257
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000258- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
259
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000260- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
261
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000262- readline.clear_history was added.
263
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000264- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
265
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000266- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
267
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000268- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
269
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000270- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
271
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000272- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
273
274- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
275
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000276- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
277
278- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
279
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000280- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
281 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
282 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
283
284- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
285 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
286 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
287 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
288 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
289 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
290 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
291
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000292- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
293 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
294 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
295 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000296
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000297- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
298 iterators from a single iterable.
299
300- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
301 of raising a TypeError exception.
302
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000303- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
304 as parameter.
305
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000306Library
307-------
308
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000309- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
310
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000311- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
312 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
313
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000314- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
315 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
316 type pattern with the same value exists.
317
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000318- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
319 when run from the command prompt).
320
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000321- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
322 not taken into consideration when caching value.
323
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000324- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
325 default sort).
326
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000327- Added global runctx function to profile module
328
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000329- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
330
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000331- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
332
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000333- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
334
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000335- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
336 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
337 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
338 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
339 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
340 accordingly.
341
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000342- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
343 decoding standards.
344
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000345- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
346 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
347 called for all requests.
348
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000349- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
350 they are passed to the compiler.
351
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000352- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
353 indent, width and depth.
354
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000355- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
356 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
357
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000358- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
359 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
360
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000361- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
362
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000363- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
364
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000365- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
366
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000367- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
368 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
369
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000370- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
371 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000372
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000373- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
374 a string).
375
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000376- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
377
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000378- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
379
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000380- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
381
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000382- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
383
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000384- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
385 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
386 list of fieldnames.
387
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000388- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
389 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
390
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000391- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
392
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000393- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
394 empty lists.
395
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000396- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
397 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
398 and shelves.
399
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000400- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
401 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
402
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000403- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000404 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
405 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000406
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000407- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
408 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000409 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000410
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000411- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000412 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
413 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
414
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000415- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
416 and removed in Py2.4.
417
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000418- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
419
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000420- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
421
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000422Tools/Demos
423-----------
424
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000425- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
426 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
427
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000428- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
429
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000430- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
431 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
432 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
433 destination in situations where both files are given.
434
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000435- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
436 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
437 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
438 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
439
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000440- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
441
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000442- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
443 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
444 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
445 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
446 now.
447
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000448- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
449 in effect
450
451- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
452 C-c C-h
453
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000454- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
455 -d option was given.
456
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000457Build
458-----
459
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000460- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
461 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
462
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000463- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
464 removed.
465
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000466- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
467 supported (see PEP 11).
468
469- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
470
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000471- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
472
473- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
474 (see PEP 11).
475
476- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
477 sizeof(char) must be 1.
478
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000479C API
480-----
481
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000482- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
483 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000484 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
485 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000486
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000487- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
488 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
489
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000490- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
491 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
492 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
493 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
494 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
495
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000496- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
497 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
498 about 10% faster.
499
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000500- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
501 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
502
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000503- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
504 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
505 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
506 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
507
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000508New platforms
509-------------
510
511Tests
512-----
513
514Windows
515-------
516
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000517- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
518 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
519 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
520 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
521
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000522- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
523 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
524 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
525
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000526Mac
527----
528
529
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000530What's New in Python 2.3 final?
531===============================
532
533*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
534
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000535IDLE
536----
537
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000538- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
539 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
540 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
541 context-menu actions.
542
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000543- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
544 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
545 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
546 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
547 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
548 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
549 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
550 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
551 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
552
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000553
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000554What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
555=============================================
556
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000557*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000558
559Core and builtins
560-----------------
561
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000562- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000563 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000564 comment at the end are still unsupported.
565
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000566Extension modules
567-----------------
568
569- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
570 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
571 than once. This has been fixed.
572
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000573- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
574 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
575 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
576 call.
577
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000578- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
579
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000580Library
581-------
582
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000583- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
584 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
585
586- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
587 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
588 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
589 restored.
590
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000591IDLE
592----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000593
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000594- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000595
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000596Build
597-----
598
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000599- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
600 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
601
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000602C API
603-----
604
605Windows
606-------
607
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000608- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
609 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
610
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000611- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
612
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000613Mac
614---
615
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000616- Various fixes to pimp.
617
618- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
619
620- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
621 more problems than it solves.
622
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000623
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000624What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
625=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000626
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000627*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
628
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000629Core and builtins
630-----------------
631
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000632- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
633 by sys.setcheckinterval().
634
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000635- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
636 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000637 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000638
639- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
640 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
641 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000642 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000643
644- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
645 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000646
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000647- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
648 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
649 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
650
651- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000652 770247.
653
654- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000655
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000656Extension modules
657-----------------
658
659- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
660 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
661
662- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
663
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000664- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
665
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000666- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
667 contained within the _strptime module.
668
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000669- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
670 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
671
672- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000673 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
674
675- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
676 the find_class attribute, if present.
677
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000678- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000679
680 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
681 (SF bug 763298).
682
683 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000684 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
685 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
686 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000687
688 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
689
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000690Library
691-------
692
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000693- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
694
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000695- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
696 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
697 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
698 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
699 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
700 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
701 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
702 or Tester().
703
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000704- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
705 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
706 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
707 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
708 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
709 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
710 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
711 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
712 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000713
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000714 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000715
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000716- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
717 weren't before was an oversight.
718
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000719- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
720 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
721
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000722- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
723 when there are no lines.
724
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000725- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
726 which could occur with Tk 8.4
727
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000728- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
729 to child processes.
730
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000731- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
732
733- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
734
735- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
736 xmlrpclib.
737
738- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
739 responses.
740
741- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
742 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
743
744- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
745 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
746 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
747
748- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
749 used as patterns.
750
751- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
752 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
753 than Tk 8.3.
754
755- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
756
757- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000758
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000759Tools/Demos
760-----------
761
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000762- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
763
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000764- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
765
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000766- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000767
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000768Build
769-----
770
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000771- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
772
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000773- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
774
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000775- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
776 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000777
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000778- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
779 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
780 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000781
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000782C API
783-----
784
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000785- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
786 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
787
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000788Windows
789-------
790
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000791- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
792 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
793 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
794 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
795 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
796 Python exception ::
797
798 thread.error: can't start new thread
799
800 is raised now.
801
802- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
803 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
804 instead of from DLL teardown.
805
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000806Mac
807---
808
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000809- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000810 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000811 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
812 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
813 the executable in the bundle.
814
815- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000816
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000817- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
818
819- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
820 on Panther.
821
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000822What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
823================================
824
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000825*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000826
827Core and builtins
828-----------------
829
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000830- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
831 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
832 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
833 with the -i option.
834
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000835- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
836 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
837
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000838- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
839 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
840
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000841- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
842 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
843 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
844 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
845 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
846 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
847 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
848 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
849 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
850 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
851 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
852 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
853 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000854
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000855- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
856 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
857 embedded in a lambda expression.
858
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000859- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
860 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
861 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
862 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
863 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
864
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000865- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
866 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
867 matches the restriction on classic classes.
868
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000869- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
870 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
871
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000872- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
873 It's writable again.
874
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000875- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
876 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
877 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000878 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000879
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000880- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
881 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
882 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
883
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000884Extension modules
885-----------------
886
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000887- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
888 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
889
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000890- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
891 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
892 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
893 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
894
895- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
896 collection.
897
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000898- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
899 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
900 unique within a single program run.
901
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000902- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
903 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
904
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000905- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
906 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
907
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000908- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
909 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000910
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000911- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
912
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000913- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
914 Fixes SF bug #730685.
915
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000916- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
917 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
918 for many BSD-derived systems.
919
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000920
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000921Library
922-------
923
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000924- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
925 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
926 primary ones:
927
928 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
929 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
930 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
931
932 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
933 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
934 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
935 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
936 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
937 framework features (which doctest lacks).
938
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000939- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
940 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
941 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
942 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
943 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
944 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
945 argument.
946
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000947- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
948 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
949 in the archive.
950
951- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
952 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
953
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000954- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
955 569574).
956
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000957- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
958 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
959 no more.
960
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000961- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
962 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
963 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
964 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
965 code coverage.
966
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000967- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
968 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
969 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000970 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
971 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000972
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000973- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
974 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
975 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000976 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000977
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000978- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
979
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000980- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
981 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
982 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
983 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
984
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000985- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
986 handling.
987
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000988- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
989 __doc__ of data descriptors.
990
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000991- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
992 in socket.py.
993
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000994- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
995
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000996- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
997 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
998 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
999 opener with proxy support.
1000
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001001- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1002
1003- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1004
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001005Tools/Demos
1006-----------
1007
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001008- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1009
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001010- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1011
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001012- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1013 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001014
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001015- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1016 files.
1017
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001018Build
1019-----
1020
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001021- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001022 different root directory.
1023
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001024C API
1025-----
1026
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001027- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1028 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1029 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1030 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1031 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1032 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1033 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1034 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1035 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1036 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1037
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001038- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1039 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1040 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1041 from Python.
1042
1043
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001044New platforms
1045-------------
1046
1047None this time.
1048
1049Tests
1050-----
1051
1052- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1053 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1054
1055Windows
1056-------
1057
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001058- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1059
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001060- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1061 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1062 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1063 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1064 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1065 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1066 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1067 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1068 that's what it's for.
1069
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001070Mac
1071---
1072
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001073- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1074 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1075 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1076 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001077- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1078 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1079- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001080
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001081SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1082------------------------------------
1083
1084430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1085598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1086622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1087661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1088683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1089697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1090713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1091724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1092727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1093729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1094730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1095731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1096732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1097733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1098735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1099740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1100744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1101745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1102747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1103749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1104751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1105753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1106755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1107757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1108760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1109
1110
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001111What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1112================================
1113
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001114*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001115
1116Core and builtins
1117-----------------
1118
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001119- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1120 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1121
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001122- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1123 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1124 and cannot be strings).
1125
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001126- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1127 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1128 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1129 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1130
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001131- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1132 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1133 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1134 Python itself.
1135
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001136- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1137 the referenced object, if it has one.
1138
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001139- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1140 the thread started at
1141 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1142
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001143- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1144 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1145 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1146 placed on a list index.
1147
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001148- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1149 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1150 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1151 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1152
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001153- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1154 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1155 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1156 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1157 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1158 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1159 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1160
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001161- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1162 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1163 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1164 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1165 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1166
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001167- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1168 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001169
1170- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1171 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1172 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1173 #693195.)
1174
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001175- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1176 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001177
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001178- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001179 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001180 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1181 interpreter executions, would fail.
1182
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001183- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001184 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001185 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001186
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001187Extension modules
1188-----------------
1189
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001190- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1191 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1192 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1193 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1194
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001195- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1196 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1197
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001198- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1199 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1200 and Greg Chapman.)
1201
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001202- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1203 recursively.
1204
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001205- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001206 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1207 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1208 leaks.
1209
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001210- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1211
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001212- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1213 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1214 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1215 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1216 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1217 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1218 #705836.
1219
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001220- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001221 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1222
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001223- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1224 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1225 See SF bug #692416.
1226
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001227- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1228 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1229
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001230- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1231 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1232 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001233
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001234- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001235 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1236 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1237
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001238- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1239 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1240 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1241 timeouts to work properly.
1242
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001243Library
1244-------
1245
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001246- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1247 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1248 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1249 future release.
1250
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001251- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1252 for querying platform dependent features.
1253
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001254- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001255
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001256- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1257 pickle protocol versions.
1258
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001259- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1260 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1261 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1262
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001263- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1264
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001265- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1266 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1267 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1268 modules.
1269
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001270- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1271 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1272 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1273
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001274- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1275 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1276
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001277- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1278 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1279 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1280
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001281- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001282 MS Office extensions.
1283
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001284- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1285 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1286
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001287- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1288 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1289
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001290- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1291 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1292 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1293 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1294 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1295 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1296
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001297- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1298 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1299 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001300
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001301- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1302 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1303 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1304
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001305- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1306
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001307- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1308 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1309 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1310
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001311Tools/Demos
1312-----------
1313
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001314- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1315 See the module docstring for details.
1316
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001317Build
1318-----
1319
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001320- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1321 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001322
1323C API
1324-----
1325
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001326- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1327
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001328- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1329 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1330 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1331
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001332- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1333 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001334
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001335 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1336 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1337 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001338
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001339- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001340 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1341
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001342- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1343 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1344 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001345
1346New platforms
1347-------------
1348
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001349None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001350
1351Tests
1352-----
1353
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001354- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1355 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001356
1357Windows
1358-------
1359
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001360- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1361 function.
1362
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001363- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1364 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001365
1366Mac
1367---
1368
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001369- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1370 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001371
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001372- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1373 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001374
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001375- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1376 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1377 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001378
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001379- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001380 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1381 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001382
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001383- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1384 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001385
1386
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001387What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1388=================================
1389
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001390*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001391
1392Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001393-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001394
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001395- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1396 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1397 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1398
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001399- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1400 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1401 (SF patch #664376.)
1402
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001403- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1404 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1405 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1406 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1407 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1408 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001409 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001410
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001411- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1412 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1413 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1414 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001415 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001416
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001417- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1418 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1419 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1420 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1421 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1422 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1423 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1424 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1425 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1426 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1427 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1428
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001429- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1430 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1431 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1432 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1433 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1434 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1435
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001436- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1437 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1438
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001439- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1440 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1441 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1442 case.)
1443
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001444- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1445 passed as unicode strings.
1446
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001447- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1448 See SF bug #683467.
1449
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001450- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1451 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1452
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001453- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1454
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001455- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1456
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001457- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1458 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1459 arguments.
1460
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001461- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1462 See SF bug #667147.
1463
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001464- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001465 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001466 See SF bug #676155.
1467
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001468- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001469 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001470 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1471 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1472 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1473 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1474 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1475 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001476
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001477Extension modules
1478-----------------
1479
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001480- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1481 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1482 tp_as_number pointer.
1483
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001484- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1485 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1486 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1487 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1488 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1489
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001490- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1491
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001492- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1493
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001494- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001495 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001496 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1497 patch #678531.)
1498
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001499- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1500 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1501
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001502- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1503 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1504
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001505- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1506
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001507- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1508 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1509 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1510
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001511- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1512
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001513- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1514 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1515
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001516- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001517
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001518- datetime changes:
1519
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001520 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1521
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001522 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1523 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1524 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1525 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1526 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1527 now.
1528
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001529 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001530 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1531 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001532
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001533 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001534 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001535 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1536 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1537 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1538 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001539
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001540 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1541 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1542 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001543 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1544
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001545 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1546 by a later example coded by Guido.
1547
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001548 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001549 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1550 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1551 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001552 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1553 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1554
1555 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1556 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1557 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1558 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1559 tzinfo subclass instance.
1560
1561 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1562 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1563 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1564 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1565 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1566 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1567 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1568 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001569
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001570 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1571 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1572 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1573 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1574 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001575 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1576
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001577 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001578
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001579 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1580 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1581 as a naive datetime object.
1582
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001583 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1584 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1585 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1586
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001587 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1588 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1589 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1590 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1591 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1592 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1593 comparison.
1594
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001595 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1596 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1597 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1598 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001599 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001600
1601 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001602
1603 and ::
1604
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001605 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1606
1607 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1608 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1609 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1610 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1611
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001612 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1613 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1614 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1615 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1616 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1617
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001618 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1619 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001620 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1621 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001622
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001623Library
1624-------
1625
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001626- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1627 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1628
1629- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1630 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1631 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1632 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1633 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1634 See PEP 307 for details.
1635
1636- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1637 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1638
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001639- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1640 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001641 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001642 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1643 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001644 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001645
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001646- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1647 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1648
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001649- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1650 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1651 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1652
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001653- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1654
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001655- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1656 exception.
1657
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001658- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1659 class.
1660
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001661- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1662 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1663 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1664
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001665- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1666 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1667
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001668- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001669 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1670 See SF bug #659228.
1671
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001672- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1673 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1674 See SF patch #651082.
1675
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001676- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001677
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001678- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1679 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1680
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001681- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001682 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001683
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001684- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1685 DOS paths from other platforms.
1686
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001687Tools/Demos
1688-----------
1689
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001690- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1691 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1692 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1693 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1694 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1695 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1696 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1697 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1698 example:
1699
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001700 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1701 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001702
1703 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1704
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001705
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001706Build
1707-----
1708
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001709- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1710 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1711 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001712 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1713
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001714 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1715
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001716- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1717 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1718 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1719 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1720 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1721 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1722 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1723 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1724 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1725
1726- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1727 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1728 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1729 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1730
1731- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1732 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1733
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001734C API
1735-----
1736
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001737- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1738 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001739
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001740- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1741 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1742 tp_as_number pointer.
1743
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001744- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1745 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1746 (SF #681367)
1747
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001748- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1749 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1750 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1751 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001752
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001753Tests
1754-----
1755
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001756- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001757 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1758 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1759 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1760 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1761 pydoc.)
1762
1763- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1764
1765- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001766
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001767Windows
1768-------
1769
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001770- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1771 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1772 time).
1773
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001774- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1775 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1776
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001777- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1778 release without strong cryptography.
1779
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001780- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001781 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001782
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001783- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1784 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1785
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001786Mac
1787---
1788
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001789- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1790 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001791
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001792- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1793 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1794 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001795
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001796- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1797 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001798
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001799- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1800 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1801 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1802 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001803
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001804- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001805 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1806 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1807 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001808
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001809
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001810What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001811=================================
1812
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001813*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001814
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001815Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001816--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001817
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001818- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1819
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001820- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1821 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001822 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001823 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001824 a different meaning than before.
1825
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001826- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001827 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001828 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001829
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001830- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001831 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001832 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001833
1834- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1835 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1836 and deallocation.
1837
1838- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1839 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1840
1841- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1842 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1843 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1844 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1845 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1846
1847- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1848 now detected by the garbage collector.
1849
1850- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1851 [SF bug 519621]
1852
1853- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1854 identifier.
1855
1856- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1857 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1858 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1859 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1860 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1861 [SF bug 563060]
1862
1863- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1864 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1865 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1866 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1867 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1868
1869- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1870 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1871 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1872
1873- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1874
1875- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1876 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1877 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1878 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1879 state of the slots would be lost.)
1880
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001881Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001882-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001883
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001884- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001885 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1886 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1887 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1888 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001889 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1890 Jython 2.1.
1891
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001892- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001893 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001894 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1895 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1896 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1897 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1898 these, see PEP 302.
1899
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001900- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1901 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1902 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1903
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001904- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1905 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1906 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1907
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001908- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1909 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1910 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1911
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001912- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1913 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1914 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1915 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1916 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1917 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1918 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1919 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1920 releases or implementations.
1921
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001922- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001923 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1924 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001925
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001926- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1927 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1928
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001929- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1930 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1931 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1932
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001933- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1934 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1935
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001936- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1937 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001938 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1939 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001940
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001941- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1942 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1943 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1944 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1945 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1946
1947 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1948 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1949 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1950 pattern.
1951
1952 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1953 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1954 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1955 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1956
1957 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1958 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1959 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1960 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1961 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1962 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1963
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001964- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1965 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1966 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1967 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1968 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1969 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1970 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1971 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001972
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001973- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1974 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1975 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1976 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1977 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001978 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1979 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1980 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1981 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1982 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1983 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1984 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001985
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001986- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1987 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1988
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001989- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1990 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1991 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1992 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1993 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1994 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1995 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1996 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1997 to Zack Weinberg!
1998
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001999- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2000 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2001 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2002 type. This has been fixed now.
2003
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002004- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2005 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2006 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2007
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002008- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2009 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2010 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2011 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2012 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2013 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2014 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2015 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002016 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002017
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002018- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2019 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2020 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002021
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002022- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2023 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2024 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2025 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2026 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2027 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2028 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2029 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002030 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002031 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2032 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2033
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002034- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2035 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2036 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2037 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2038 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2039 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2040 this.)
2041
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002042- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2043 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002044 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002045 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002046 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2047 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002048 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2049 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002050
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002051- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2052 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2053 currently running.
2054
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002055- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2056 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2057 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2058 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2059
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002060- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2061 as directory names.
2062
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002063- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2064 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2065
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002066- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2067 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2068
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002069- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002070 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2071 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002072
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002073- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2074 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2075 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2076 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2077 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2078
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002079- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2080 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2081 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2082 removed.
2083
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002084- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2085 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2086 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2087
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002088- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2089 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2090 to __debug__.
2091
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002092- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2093 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2094 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2095
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002096- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2097 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2098 deprecated now.
2099
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002100- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2101 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2102 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002103
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002104- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2105 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2106 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2107 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2108 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002109
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002110- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2111 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2112
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002113- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2114 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2115 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002116 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002117 is backward compatible.
2118
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002119- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2120 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2121 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2122 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2123 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2124
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002125- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2126 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2127 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2128 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2129 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2130 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002131
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002132- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2133 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2134
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002135- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2136 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2137
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002138- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2139 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2140 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2141 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2142 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2143
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002144- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2145 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2146 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2147
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002148- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002149 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2150
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002151- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2152 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2153 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002154
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002155- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2156 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2157
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002158- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2159 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2160 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2161
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002162- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2163
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002164Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002165-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002166
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002167- Added three operators to the operator module:
2168 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2169 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2170 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2171
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002172- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2173
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002174- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2175 archives.
2176
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002177- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2178 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2179 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2180
2181 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2182
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002183- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2184 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2185 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002186 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002187
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002188- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2189 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2190 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2191 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002192 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2193 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2194 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2195 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002196
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002197- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2198 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002199
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002200- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2201
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002202- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2203 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2204
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002205- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2206 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2207 supported.
2208
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002209- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2210
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002211- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2212 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002213
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002214- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2215 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2216
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002217- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2218
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002219- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2220 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2221
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002222- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2223 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2224 functions but callable type objects.
2225
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002226- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002227 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002228 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002229
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002230- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2231 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002232
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002233- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2234 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002235
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002236- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2237 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2238 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2239 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2240
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002241- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2242 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002243
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002244- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2245 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2246 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2247 and __imul__.
2248
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002249- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002250 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2251 is called.
2252
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002253- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2254 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2255 interpreter was compiled.
2256
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002257- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2258 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2259 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002260 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002261 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2262 1, not 2.
2263
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002264- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2265 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2266 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2267 limit.
2268
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002269- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2270 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2271 bug #623464.
2272
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002273- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2274 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2275 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2276 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2277
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002278Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002279-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002280
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002281- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2282
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002283- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2284 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2285 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2286 with Python 2.3a2.
2287
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002288- os.path exposes getctime.
2289
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002290- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002291 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002292 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002293 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002294 unit tests of floating point results.
2295
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002296- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2297 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2298 has been increased.
2299
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002300- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2301 executed.
2302
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002303- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2304 postinstallation script.
2305
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002306- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2307 test the current module.
2308
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002309- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002310 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2311 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2312 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2313 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2314
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002315- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002316 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002317 Ward's Optik package.
2318
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002319- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2320 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2321 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2322 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2323
2324- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2325 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002326 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002327
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002328- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2329 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2330 shelf are binary pickles.
2331
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002332- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2333 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2334
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002335- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2336 modules are iterators now.
2337
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002338- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2339 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2340 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2341 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2342 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2343 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002344
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002345- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2346 with their entity value.
2347
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002348- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2349
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002350- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2351 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002352
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002353- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2354 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002355 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002356
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002357- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2358 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2359 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2360 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2361 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2362 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2363 main():
2364
2365 import locale
2366 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2367
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002368- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2369 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2370
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002371- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2372 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2373 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2374 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2375 to the new standard.
2376
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002377- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2378 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2379 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2380 an extension to the database.
2381
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002382- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2383 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2384 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2385 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002386 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002387
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002388- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002389 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002390
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002391- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2392 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2393 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2394 bounded integers.
2395
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002396- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2397 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2398 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2399 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2400 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2401 in existence.
2402
2403 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2404 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2405 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2406 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2407 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2408 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2409
2410 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2411 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2412 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2413 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2414
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002415- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2416 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2417 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2418
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002419- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2420
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002421- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2422 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2423 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2424 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2425
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002426- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2427 argument.
2428
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002429- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2430 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2431 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2432 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2433 [SF patch 560794].
2434
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002435- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2436 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2437 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002438 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2439 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2440 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002441
2442- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2443 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002444
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002445- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2446 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2447 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2448 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002449
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002450- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2451 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2452 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2453 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2454 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2455
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002456- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002457
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002458- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2459
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002460- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2461 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2462 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2463 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2464 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2465 identical to None.
2466
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002467- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2468 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2469 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2470 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2471 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2472 results now.
2473
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002474- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2475 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2476
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002477- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2478 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2479 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2480 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2481 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2482 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2483 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2484 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2485
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002486- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2487
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002488- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2489 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2490
2491- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2492 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2493 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2494 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2495 and other systems.
2496
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002497- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2498 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2499 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2500 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 +00002501 work well with these.
2502
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002503- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2504
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002505- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002506 connections.
2507
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002508- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2509 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2510 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2511
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002512- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2513 sets
2514
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002515- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2516 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2517 name.
2518
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002519- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2520 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2521 passed in.
2522
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002523- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002524 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002525 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2526 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002527
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002528- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2529
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002530- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2531
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002532- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2533 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2534 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2535
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002536- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2537 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2538 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2539 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002540 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002541
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002542- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002543 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002544 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002545
2546- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2547 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2548 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2549
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002550- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002551 the value of its expression argument.
2552
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002553- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2554 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2555 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2556
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002557- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2558 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2559 skipstone browser was included.
2560
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002561- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2562 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2563
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002564Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002565-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002566
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002567- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2568 names in addition to accepting file names.
2569
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002570- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2571 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2572 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2573 still used and useful.)
2574
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002575- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2576 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2577 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2578 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002579
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002580- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2581 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2582 the generated binary.
2583
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002584Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002586
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002587- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2588
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002589- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2590 except in the hands of experts.
2591
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002592- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002593 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2594 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2595 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002596
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002597- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2598 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2599 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2600 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2601 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2602 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2603 builds.
2604
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002605- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2606 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2607 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2608 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2609 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2610 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2611 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2612 new type.
2613
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002614- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002615
2616 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2617 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2618 positive infinities.
2619
2620 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2621 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2622 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2623 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2624 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2625 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2626 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2627
2628 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2629
2630 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2631
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002632- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2633 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2634 size of the executable.
2635
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002636- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2637 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2638 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2639 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002640
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002641- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2642
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002643- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2644 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2645 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002646
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002647- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2648 well as Unix.
2649
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002650- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2651 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2652 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2653 modules in the README file for details.
2654
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002655C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002656-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002657
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002658- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2659 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002660 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002661 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002662 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002663
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002664- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2665 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2666 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2667 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2668 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2669 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002670 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002671 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2672 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2673 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2674 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2675 aligned.)
2676
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002677- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2678 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2679 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2680
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002681- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2682 level.
2683
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002684- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2685 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2686 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2687 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2688 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2689
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002690- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2691 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2692 code.
2693
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002694- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2695 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2696 adjusting for negative indices.
2697
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002698- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2699 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2700 object.
2701
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002702- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2703 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2704 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2705
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002706- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2707 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002708
2709- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2710
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002711- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2712 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2713 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2714 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2715
2716- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2717
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002718- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002719
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002720- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002721 without going through the buffer API.
2722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002723- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002724
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002725- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2726 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2727 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2728 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2729
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002730- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2731 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2732
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002733- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002734 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2735
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002736New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002737-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002738
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002739- OpenVMS is now supported.
2740
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002741- AtheOS is now supported.
2742
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002743- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2744
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002745- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2746
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002747Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002748-----
2749
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002750- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2751 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2752 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002753
2754Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002755-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002756
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002757- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2758 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2759 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2760 bugs.
2761 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002762 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002763 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2764 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002765 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002766
2767- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002768 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002769
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002770- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2771 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2772
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002773- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2774 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002775 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002776 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2777
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002778- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2779 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2780 use files" uninstall option).
2781
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002782- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2783
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002784- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2785 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2786
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002787- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2788 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2789 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2790
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002791- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2792 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2793 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2794 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2795 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002796 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2797 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2798 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002799
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002800- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002801 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002802 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2803 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2804 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2805 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2806 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2807 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2808 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2809 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2810 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2811 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2812 work around.
2813
2814- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2815 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2816 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2817 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2818 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2819 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2820 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2821 specified with O_CREAT too).
2822
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002823Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002824----
2825
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002826- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002827
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002828- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2829 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2830 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2831
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002832- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2833 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2834 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2835
2836- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2837 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2838 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2839 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2840 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2841 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2842 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2843 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002844
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002845- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2846 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2847 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002848
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002849- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2850 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2851 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2852 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2853 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002854
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002855- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2856 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2857 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002858
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002859- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2860 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002861
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002862- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2863 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2864 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2865 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2866 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002867
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002868- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2869 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2870 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2871
2872- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2873 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2874 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002875
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002876- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2877 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2878 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2879 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002880 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002881
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002882- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2883 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002884
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002885- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2886 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002887
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002888- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002889 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002890 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2891 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002892
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002893
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002894What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002895===============================
2896
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002897*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2898
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002899Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002901
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002902- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2903 with a custom metaclass.
2904
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002905Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002906-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002907
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002908- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2909 are proxies.
2910
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002911Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002912-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002913
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002914- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2915 very short strings.
2916
2917- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2918 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2919 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2920 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2921 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2922
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002923Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002924-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002925
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002926- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2927 close or delete time).
2928
2929- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2930 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2931
2932- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2933
2934- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002935 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002936
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002937Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002938-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002939
2940Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002941-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002942
2943C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002944-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002945
2946New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002947-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002948
2949Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002950-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002951
2952Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002953-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002954
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002955- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2956
2957- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2958 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2959
2960- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2961 deleted at process exit time.
2962
2963- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2964 in backslash.
2965
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002966Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002969- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2970 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2971 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2972
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002973
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002974What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002975===========================
2976
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002977*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2978
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002979Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002980--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002981
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002982- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2983 been extensively updated. See
2984
2985 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2986
2987 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2988
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002989- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2990 deleted!
2991
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002992- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2993 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2994 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2995 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2996 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2997
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002998- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2999
3000 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3001 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3002
3003 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3004 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3005 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3006 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3007 supported anyway.
3008
3009 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3010 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3011
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003012- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3013 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3014 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3015 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3016 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003017
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003018- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3019 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3020 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3021
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003022Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003024
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003025- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3026 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3027 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3028 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3029 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3030 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003031 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3032 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3033 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3034 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003035
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003036- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3037 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3038 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3039
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003040Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003042
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003043- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3044
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003045Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003046-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003047
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003048- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3049 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3050 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3051 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3052 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3053 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3054
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003055- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3056
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003057- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3058
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003059- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3060
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003061- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3062 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3063 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3064
3065- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3066
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003067Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003068-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003069
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003070- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3071 off a search on Google.
3072
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003073Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003074-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003075
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003076- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3077 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3078 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3079 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3080 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3081 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3082 other platforms should do likewise.
3083
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003084- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3085 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3086 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3087
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003088C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003090
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003091- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3092 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3093 producing key-value pairs.
3094
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003095- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003096 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003097 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3098 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3099 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3100 previously went unchallenged.
3101
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003102New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003103-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003104
3105Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003106-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003107
3108Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003110
3111Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003113
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003114- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3115 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003116
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003117- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3118 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3119 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3120 home.
3121
3122
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003123What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003124===========================
3125
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003126*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3127
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003128Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003130
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003131- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3132 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003133
3134 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003135 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003136
3137 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3138 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003139 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003140 This needs to be documented.
3141
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003142- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3143 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3144
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003145- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3146 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3147 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3148
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003149- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3150 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3151
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003152- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3153 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3154 class forbids it).
3155
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003156- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3157 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3158 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3159
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003160- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3161
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003162Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003164
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003165- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3166 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003167 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003168
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003169- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3170 (like 1 + '').
3171
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003172Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003173-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003174
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003175- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3176 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3177 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3178 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003179 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003180 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3181
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003182- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3183 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3184 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3185 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3186
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003187- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3188 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003189 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3190 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3191 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003192
3193- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3194 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003195
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003196- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3197 bytes on its input.
3198
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003199Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003201
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003202- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003203 convenience function.
3204
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003205- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3206 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3207 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003208 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3209 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3210 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3211 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3212 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3213 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003214
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003215- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3216 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3217 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3218 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3219
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003220- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3221 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3222 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3223
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003224- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3225 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3226 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3227 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3228
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003229- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3230 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003232 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3233 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3234 new -l and -e options.
3235
3236- statcache is now deprecated.
3237
3238- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3239 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003241 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3242 time properly taken into account.
3243
3244- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3245 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3246 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3247 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3248
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003249Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003250-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003251
3252Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003253-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003254
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003255- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3256 is built with libdb3 if available.
3257
3258- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3259
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003260C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003262
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003263- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3264 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3265 PySequence_Size().
3266
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003267- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3268
3269- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3270 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3271 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3272
3273- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3274 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3275
3276- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3277 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3278
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003279New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003280-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003281
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003282- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3283 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3284
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003285- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3286 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3287
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003288- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3289
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003290Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003291-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003292
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003293- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3294 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3295
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003296Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003297-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003298
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003299Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003300----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003301
3302- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3303 removed completely in the next release.
3304
3305- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3306 OSX.
3307
3308- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3309 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3310
3311- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003313
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003314What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003315===========================
3316
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3318
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003319Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003321
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003322- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003323 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003324 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003325 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3326 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003327 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3328 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003329 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3330 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003331
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003332- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3333 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3334
3335- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3336 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3337
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003338Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003340
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003341- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3342 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3343 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3344 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3345 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3346 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3347 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3348 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3349
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003350- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3351 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3352 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3353 example).
3354
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003355- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003356 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003357 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003358 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003359
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003360- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3361 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3362 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003363 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003364
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003365- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3366 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3367 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3368 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3369 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3370 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3371
3372 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3373
3374 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3375
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003376Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003377-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003378
3379- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3380
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003381- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3382
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003383- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3384 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003385
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003386- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3387 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3388 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3389 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3390 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3391 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003392 attributes.
3393
3394- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3395 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3396 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003397
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003398- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3399 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3400 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003401
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003402- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3403 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3404 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003405 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3406 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3407
3408- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3409 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003410
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003411Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003412-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003413
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003414- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3415 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3416
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003417- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3418 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3419 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3420 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3421
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003422- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3423 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3424 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3425 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3426
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003427 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3428 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3429 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3430 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3431 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3432 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3433 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3434 without losing information).
3435
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003436- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003437 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3438 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3439 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3440 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3441 module).
3442
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003443 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003444 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3445 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3446 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3447 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003448
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003449- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003450 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3451 encoding.
3452
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003453- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3454 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3455
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003456- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003457 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3458
3459- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3460 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3461 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3462 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3463
3464- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3465
3466- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3467 ON, and OFF.
3468
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003469- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3470 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3471
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003472Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003473-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003474
3475- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3476 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3477 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003478
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003479- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3480 been added: -X and -E.
3481
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003482Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003484
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003485- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3486 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3487
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003488C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003489-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003490
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003491- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3492 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3493 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3494 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3495 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3496
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003497- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3498 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3499 as long) arguments.
3500
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003501- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3502 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3503 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3504 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3505 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3506 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3507
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003508- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3509 input.
3510
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003511New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003513
3514Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003515-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003516
3517Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003518-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003519
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003520- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3521 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3522 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3523
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003524- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3525 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3526 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003527 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003528
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3530 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3531 import signal
3532 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003533
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003534 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003535 while 1:
3536 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003538 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3539 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3540 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3541 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003542
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003543
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003544What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3545===========================
3546
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003547*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3548
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003549Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003551
3552- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3553 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3554 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3555
3556- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3557 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3558 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3559 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3560 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3561 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3562 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003563
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003564- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003565 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003566 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3567 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3568 associate a docstring with a property.
3569
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003570- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3571 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3572 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3573 other built-in object types.
3574
3575- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3576 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3577 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3578 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3579 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3580
3581- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3582 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3583
3584- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3585 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003586 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003587 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3588 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3589 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3590 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3591 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3592
3593- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3594 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3595 class.
3596
3597- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3598 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3599 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3600 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3601
3602- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3603 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3604 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3605 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3606
3607- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3608 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3609
3610- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3611 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3612 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3613 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3614 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003615 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003616 with the same value as s.
3617
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003618- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3619
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003620Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003622
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003623- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3624
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003625- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3626 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3627 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3628 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3629 objects.
3630
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003631- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3632 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003633 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3634 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3635
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003636- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3637 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3638 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3639
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003640Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003641-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003642
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003643- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3644 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3645 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3646 by the instances.
3647
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003648- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3649 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3650 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3651
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003652- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3653 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3654 before the entire comparison is complete.
3655
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003656- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3657 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3658 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3659
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003660- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3661 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3662 getwriter().
3663
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003664- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3665 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3666
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003667- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003668 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3669 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3670
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003671- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3672 iterable object.
3673
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003674- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3675 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003676
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003677- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3678 authentication.
3679
3680- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3681 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003682
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003683- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003684 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3685 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3686 a sample driver.)
3687
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003688Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003689-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003690
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003691- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3692 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3693 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3694 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3695 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3696 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3697 kernel has large file support.
3698
3699- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3700 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3701 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3702 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3703 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3704
3705- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3706 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3707 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3708
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003709C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003711
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003712- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3713 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3714
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003715New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003717
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003718- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3719 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3720
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003721Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003723
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003724- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3725 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3726 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3727 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3728 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3729
3730- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3731 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3732 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3733 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3734
3735- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3736 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3737
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003738Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003739-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003740
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003741- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003742 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3743 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003744
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003745
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003746What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3747===========================
3748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3750
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003751Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003753
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003754- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3755 big to represent as a C double.
3756
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003757- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3758 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3759 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3760 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3761 restriction).
3762
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003763- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3764 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3765 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3766 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3767 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3768
3769 >>> dir([])
3770 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3771 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3772 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3773 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3774 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3775 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3776 'reverse', 'sort']
3777
3778 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3779
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003780- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003781 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3782 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3783 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3784 OverflowError exception.
3785
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003786- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003787 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003788 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3789 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3790 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3791 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3792 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003793 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3795 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3796
3797 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3798 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3799 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3800 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003801
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003802- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003803 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3804 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3805 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3806 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3807 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3808 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3809 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3810 once it is created.
3811
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003812- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3813 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3814 (key, value) pairs.
3815
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003816- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003817 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3818 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3819
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003820- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3821 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3822 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3823 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3824 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003825
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003826- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003827 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3828 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3829
3830 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3831
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003832- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003833 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3834
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003835Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003837
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003838- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003839 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3840 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003841
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003842- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3843 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3844 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3845 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3846 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3847 in this area anymore).
3848
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003849- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3850 threading.Timer.
3851
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003852- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3853 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003855- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003856 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3857
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003858- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003859 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3860 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3861 converted to Python longs.
3862
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003863- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003864 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3865
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003866- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3867 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3868 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3869
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003870Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003872
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003873- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3874 division operators as per PEP 238.
3875
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003876Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003877-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003878
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003879- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3880 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3881 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3882 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3883
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003884C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003885-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003886
3887- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003888
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003889- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3890 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003891 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003892
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3894 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003895 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003896 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003897
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003898- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003899 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3900 module:
3901
3902 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003903
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003904 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3905 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003906
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003907 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3908 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003909
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003910 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3911
3912 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3913
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003914- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003915 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3916 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3917 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003918
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003919New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003921
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003922- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3923 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3924 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3925 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3926 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003927
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003928Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003930
3931Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003932-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003933
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003934- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3935 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3936 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3937 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003938 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3939 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3940 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3941 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3942 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003943
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003944- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003945 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3946
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003947
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003948What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3949===========================
3950
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3952
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003953Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003955
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003956- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3957 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3958
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003959- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3960 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3961 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003962
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003963- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3964 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3965 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3966 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003967
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003968- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3969
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003970- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003971
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003972Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003974
3975- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003976 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003977 the module docstring for details.
3978
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003979Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003980-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003981
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003982- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003983 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3984 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3985 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003986
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003987- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3988 Nick Mathewson.
3989
3990Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003992
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003993- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3994 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3995 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3996 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3997 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3998 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3999 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4000 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4001
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004002- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4003 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4004 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4005 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4006
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004007- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4008 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4009 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4010 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4011 come a long way).
4012
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004013- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4014 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4015 write filters for these warnings).
4016
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004017- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4018 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4019 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4020 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4021 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4022
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004023- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4024 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4025 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4026 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4027 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4028 older distribution.
4029
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004030Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004031-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004032
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004033- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4034 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004035 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004036
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004037- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4038 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4039 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4040
4041- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4042
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004043- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4044
4045- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4046
4047- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004050
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004051- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4052
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004053New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004055
4056C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004058
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004059- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4060 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4061 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4062 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4063 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4064 against buffer overruns.
4065
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004066- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004067 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4068 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004069 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4070 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4071 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4072
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004073- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4074 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4075 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4076 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4077 deprecated.
4078
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004079Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004081
4082- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4083 relevant is found.
4084
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004085
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004086What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004087===========================
4088
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004089*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4090
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004091Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004093
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004094- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4095 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4096 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4097 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4098 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4099 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4100 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4101 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004102 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004103 repaired.
4104
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004105- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004106 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004107 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4108 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4109 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4110 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4111 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4112 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4113 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4114 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4115
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004116- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4117 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4118 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4119 leading BMO character).
4120
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004121- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4122 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4123 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4124
4125 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4126 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4127 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004128
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004129 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4130 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4131 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4132 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4133 for various simple to use conversions.
4134
4135 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4136 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4137
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4139 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4140 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4141 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4142 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4143 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4144 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4145 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4146 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4147 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4148 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4149 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4150 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4151 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4152 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004153
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004154- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4155 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4156 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004157 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004158 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004159
4160 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004161 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4162 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4163 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4164 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4165 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004166 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4167 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004168
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004169 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4170 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4171 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004172 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004173
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004174- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4175 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4176 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4177 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4178 floating arithmetic,
4179
4180 x = 9007199254740992.0
4181 print long(x)
4182
4183 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4184 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4185 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4186 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4187 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4188 functions are of good quality).
4189
4190 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4191 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4192 algorithms to break.
4193
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004194- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4195 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4196 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4197 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4198 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4199 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4200 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4201 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4202 order.
4203
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004204- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4205 operation along the most common code paths.
4206
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004207- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4208 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4209
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004210- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4211 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4212 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4213 {}.update(UserDict())
4214
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004215- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4216 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4217 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4218 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4219 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4220 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4221 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4222 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4223
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004224- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004225 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004227 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004228 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4229 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004230 join() method of strings
4231 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004232 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4233 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004235 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004236
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004237- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4238 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4239
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004240- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4241 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4242
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004243- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4244 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4245 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4246 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4247
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004248- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4249 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004250 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004251 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4252 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004253
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004254- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4255
4256
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004257Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004259
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004260- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004261 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004262 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4263 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4264
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004265- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4266 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4267
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004268- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4269 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4270 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4271 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4272
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004273- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4274 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4275 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4276
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004277- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4278
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004279- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4280
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004281- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4282 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4283 that are still imported into string.py).
4284
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004285- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4286
4287- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4288 Now it does.
4289
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004290- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4291
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004292- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4293 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4294 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4295 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4296 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004297 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4298 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004299
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004300- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4301 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4302 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4303 'help(object)'.
4304
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004305Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004307
4308- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004309 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004310 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4311 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4312
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004313- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004314 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4315 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004316
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004317C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004319
4320- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4321 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322
4323----
4324
4325**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**