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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-XXXX*
11
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +000012License
13-------
14
15The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
16is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
17changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
18Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
19intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
20durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
21the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
22License::
23
24 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
25
26says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
27to Python 2.1.1.
28
29The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
30License Version 2.
31
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000032Core and builtins
33-----------------
34
35...
36
37Extension Modules
38-----------------
39
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +000040- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
41 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
42 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
43 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000044
45Library
46-------
47
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +000048- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
49 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
50
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +000051- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
52
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +000053- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
54 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000055
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +000056- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
57
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +000058- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
59
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000060Build
61-----
62
63...
64
65C API
66-----
67
68...
69
70Documentation
71-------------
72
73...
74
75Tests
76-----
77
78...
79
80Windows
81-------
82
83...
84
85Mac
86---
87
88...
89
90New platforms
91-------------
92
93...
94
95Tools/Demos
96-----------
97
98...
99
100
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000101What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
102================================
103
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000104*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000105
106Core and builtins
107-----------------
108
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000109- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000110 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
111
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000112- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
113 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
114 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
115 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
116
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000117- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
118 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
119
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000120- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
121 constant.
122
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000123- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
124 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
125 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
126 large), and to anomalies such as
127 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
128 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
129 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
130 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000131
132Extension modules
133-----------------
134
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000135- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
136 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000137 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
138 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
139 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000140
141Library
142-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000143
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000144- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000145 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000146 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
147 --swig-cpp.
148
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000149- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
150 it is set.
151
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000152- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000153
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000154- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
155 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
156 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
157 Closes bug #1039270.
158
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000159- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000160
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000161 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000162 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
163 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
164 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
165 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
166 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
167 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
168 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
169 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
170 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
171 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
172 + Updates to documentation.
173
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000174- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
175 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
176 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
177 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
178
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000179- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000180
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000181- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
182 applications should use the getmember function.
183
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000184- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
185
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000186- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
187 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
188 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
189 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
190 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
191 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
192 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
193 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
194 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
195
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000196- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
197 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000198 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000199
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000200- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
201 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
202 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
203 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
204 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
205 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
206 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
207 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000208
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000209- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
210 the new public features (of which there are many).
211
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000212- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000213 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
214 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
215 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
216 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000217 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000218
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000219- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
220
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000221- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
222 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
223 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
224 options.
225
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000226- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
227 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
228 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
229 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
230 conditions under which non-string values work.
231
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000232Build
233-----
234
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000235- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
236 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
237 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
238
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000239- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
240 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
241 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
242 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
243 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000244
245C API
246-----
247
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000248- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
249 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
250
251- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
252
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000253- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
254 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
255 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
256 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
257 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
258 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
259 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
260 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
261 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
262
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000263- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
264
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000265- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
266 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
267 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000268
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000269Tests
270-----
271
272- test__locale ported to unittest
273
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000274Mac
275---
276
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000277- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
278 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
279 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000280
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000281Tools/Demos
282-----------
283
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000284- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
285 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
286 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
287 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
288 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000289
290
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000291What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
292=================================
293
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000294*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000295
296Core and builtins
297-----------------
298
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000299- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000300 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
301
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000302- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
303 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
304 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
305 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
306 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
307 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
308 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
309 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000310 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
311 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
312 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
313 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
314 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000315
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000316- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
317 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
318 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
319 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
320 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
321
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000322- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
323
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000324- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
325 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
326
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000327- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
328 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
329 modified the list.
330
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000331- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
332 functions is now writable.
333
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000334- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
335 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
336 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
337 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
338
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000339- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
340 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
341 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
342 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
343 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000344
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000345- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
346 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
347
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000348Extension modules
349-----------------
350
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000351- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
352
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000353- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
354 data.
355
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000356- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
357 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
358 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
359 supposed to have been truncated away.
360
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000361- Added socket.socketpair().
362
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000363- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
364 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
365
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000366- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000367 versions of Python, have now been removed.
368
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000369Library
370-------
371
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000372- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000373 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000374
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000375- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
376 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
377
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000378- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
379 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
380
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000381- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
382
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000383- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
384 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000385
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000386- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
387 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
388
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000389- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
390
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000391- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
392
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000393- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
394
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000395- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
396 Percivall.
397
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000398- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
399 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
400
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000401- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
402 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
403 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000404 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000405
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000406- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
407 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
408 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
409 and exponent.
410
411- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
412
413- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
414 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
415 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
416
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000417- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
418 to the readline module.
419
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000420- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000421 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
422 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000423
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000424- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
425 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
426 contains symlinks.
427
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000428- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
429 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
430
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000431- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
432 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
433 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
434
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000435- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
436 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
437 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
438 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
439 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
440 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
441 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
442 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
443 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
444 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
445 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
446 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
447 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
448
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000449- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
450
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000451Tools/Demos
452-----------
453
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000454- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
455 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
456
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000457- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
458
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000459Build
460-----
461
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000462- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
463 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
464 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
465 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
466 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
467 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
468 plans to do so.
469
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000470- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
471 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
472
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000473- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
474 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
475
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000476- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
477 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
478
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000479- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
480 GNU/k*BSD systems.
481
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000482- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
483 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
484
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000485C API
486-----
487
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000488..
489
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000490Documentation
491-------------
492
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000493- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
494 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
495
496- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
497 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
498 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000499
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000500New platforms
501-------------
502
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000503- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
504
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000505Tests
506-----
507
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000508..
509
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000510Windows
511-------
512
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000513- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
514 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
515 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
516 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
517 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
518 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
519 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
520 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
521 the problem.
522
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000523Mac
524---
525
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000526..
527
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000528
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000529What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
530=================================
531
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000532*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000533
534Core and builtins
535-----------------
536
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000537- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
538 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
539 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
540 sensitive code.
541
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000542- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000543 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000544
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000545 @staticmethod
546 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000547
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000548 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000549
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000550- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
551 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
552 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
553 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
554 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
555 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
556 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
557 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
558 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
559 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
560 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
561
562 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
563 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
564 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
565 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
566 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
567 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
568 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
569
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000570- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
571 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
572
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000573- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000574 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000575
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000576- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000577 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000578 which was missing for no apparent reason.
579
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000580- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000581 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
582 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
583
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000584- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
585 types that support garbage collection.
586
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000587- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
588
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000589- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
590 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
591 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
592 Jython.
593
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000594- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
595
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000596- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
597 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
598
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000599- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
600 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
601 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000602
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000603- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
604 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
605 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
606
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000607Extension modules
608-----------------
609
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000610- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
611
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000612Library
613-------
614
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000615- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
616 TIS-620
617
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000618- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
619 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
620 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
621 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
622 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
623 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
624 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
625 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
626 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
627 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
628
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000629- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
630
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000631- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
632 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
633 same as when the argument is omitted).
634 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
635
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000636- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
637
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000638- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
639 schemes are offered.
640
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000641- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
642
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000643- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
644 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
645 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
646
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000647- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
648
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000649- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
650 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
651
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000652- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
653 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
654 when dummy_threading is being used.
655
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000656- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
657 from a tarfile.
658
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000659- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000660 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000661
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000662- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
663 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
664 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
665 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
666
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000667- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
668 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
669
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000670- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
671 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
672 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
673 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
674 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
675 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
676 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
677 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
678 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
679 by some other method in progress).
680
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000681- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
682 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
683 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000684
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000685- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
686
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000687- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
688 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
689 AM Kuchling.
690
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000691- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
692 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
693 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
694
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000695- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
696 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
697 instead of unsigned.
698
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000699- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000700 no longer part of the public API.
701
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000702- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
703 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
704 string methods of the same name).
705
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000706- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000707 SF patch 945642.
708
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000709- doctest unittest integration improvements:
710
711 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
712
713 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
714 DocTestSuites.
715
716- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
717 that provide thread-local data.
718
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000719- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
720 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
721
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000722- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
723
724- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
725 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
726 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
727
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000728- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
729
730 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
731 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
732 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000733
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000734 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
735 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
736 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
737 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
738
739 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
740 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
741
742 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
743 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
744 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
745 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
746
747 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
748 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
749 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
750 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
751 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
752
753 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
754 wrapping help output.
755
756 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
757 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
758 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000759
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000760C API
761-----
762
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000763- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
764 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
765 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
766 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
767 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
768 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
769 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
770 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
771 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
772 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
773 its visible semantics have not changed.
774
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000775- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
776 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
777
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000778Documentation
779-------------
780
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000781- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000782
783 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000784 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000785
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000786 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000787
788 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
789
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000790- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000791
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000792Tests
793-----
794
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000795- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000796 platforms that use the Makefile.
797
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000798- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
799 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
800 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
801
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000802
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000803What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
804=================================
805
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000806*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000807
808Core and builtins
809-----------------
810
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000811- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
812 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
813 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
814 objects now (one object instead of three).
815
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000816- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
817 Windows DLLs.
818
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000819- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
820 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000821
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000822- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
823 a new .pyc magic.
824
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000825- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
826 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
827 be there.
828
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000829- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
830 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
831 the LC_NUMERIC category.
832
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000833- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
834 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
835 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
836
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000837- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
838
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000839- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
840 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
841 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000842
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000843- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
844 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
845
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000846- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
847
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000848- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000849 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000850
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000851- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
852
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000853- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
854
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000855- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
856 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
857
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000858- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
859 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
860 Fixes bug #858016 .
861
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000862- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
863 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
864 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
865
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000866- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
867 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
868 improves their performance (about 35%).
869
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000870- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
871 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
872 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
873
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000874- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
875 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
876 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
877 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
878
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000879- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
880 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
881 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
882 length is not known).
883
884- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
885 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000886 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
887 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000888 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
889
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000890- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
891 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
892
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000893- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
894 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
895 keyword arguments.
896
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000897- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
898 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
899 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
900
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000901- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
902 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
903 cases.
904
905- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
906 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
907 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
908 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
909 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
910 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
911 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
912 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
913 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
914 a release build.
915
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000916- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
917 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
918
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000919- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000920 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000921
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000922- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
923 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
924 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
925 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
926 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
927 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
928 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
929 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
930 destroyed.
931
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000932- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
933 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
934 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
935 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
936 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
937 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
938 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
939 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
940
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000941- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
942 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
943 character other than a space.
944
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000945- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
946 by the function object or by the method object, the function
947 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
948 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
949 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
950 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
951 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
952 attributes with the same name.
953
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000954- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
955 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
956 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
957 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
958 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
959 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
960 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
961 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
962 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
963 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
964 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
965 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
966 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
967 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000968
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000969- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
970 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
971 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
972 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
973 This has been repaired.
974
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000975- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
976
977- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
978
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000979- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
980 over a sequence.
981
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000982- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000983 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000984
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000985- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
986
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000987- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
988 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
989 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
990 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
991 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
992 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
993 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
994 records with equal keys is unchanged).
995
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000996- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
997 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
998 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
999
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001000- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1001 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1002 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1003 freelist.
1004
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001005- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1006 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1007
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001008- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1009 number.
1010
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001011- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1012 a TypeError exception.
1013
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001014- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1015 820195.
1016
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001017- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1018 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1019 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1020
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001021- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001022 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1023 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001024
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001025- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1026 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1027 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1028
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001029- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1030 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001031 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001032
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001033- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001034 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1035 the first call.
1036
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001037
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001038Extension modules
1039-----------------
1040
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001041- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1042 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1043
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001044- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1045 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1046 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1047 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1048 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1049 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1050 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001051
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001052- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1053
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001054- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1055
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001056- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1057 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1058
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001059- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1060 fewer false positives.
1061
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001062- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1063 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1064
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001065- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001066 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1067
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001068- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001069 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001070 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001071 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1072 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001073
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001074- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1075 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1076 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1077 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1078
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001079- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1080 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1081 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1082 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1083 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1084 #897625.
1085
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001086- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1087 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1088
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001089- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1090 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1091 and pops on either side of the deque.
1092
1093- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1094 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1095
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001096- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1097 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1098 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1099 other functions that expect a function argument.
1100
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001101- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1102
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001103- os.getsid was added.
1104
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001105- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1106 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1107 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1108
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001109- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1110
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001111- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1112
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001113- readline.clear_history was added.
1114
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001115- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1116
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001117- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1118
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001119- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1120
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001121- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1122
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001123- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1124
1125- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1126
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001127- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1128
1129- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1130
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001131- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1132 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1133 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1134
1135- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1136 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1137 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1138 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1139 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1140 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1141 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1142
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001143- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1144 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1145 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1146 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001147
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001148- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001149 iterators from a single iterable.
1150
1151- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1152 of raising a TypeError exception.
1153
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001154- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1155 as parameter.
1156
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001157Library
1158-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001159
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001160- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1161 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1162 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001163
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001164- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1165 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1166 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001167
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001168- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001169
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001170- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1171 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001172
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001173- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1174 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1175
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001176- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1177
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001178- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001179 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001180
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001181- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001182 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001183
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001184- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1185
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001186- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1187 on cygwin and mingw32.
1188
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001189- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1190
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001191- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1192 module.
1193
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001194- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1195 installation scheme for all platforms.
1196
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001197- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001198 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001199
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001200- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1201 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1202 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1203
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001204- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1205 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1206 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1207
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001208- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1209
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001210- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1211
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001212- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1213 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1214
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001215- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1216 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1217 type pattern with the same value exists.
1218
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001219- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1220 when run from the command prompt).
1221
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001222- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1223 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1224
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001225- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1226 default sort).
1227
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001228- Added global runctx function to profile module
1229
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001230- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1231
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001232- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1233
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001234- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1235
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001236- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001237 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1238 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1239 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1240 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1241 accordingly.
1242
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001243- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1244 decoding standards.
1245
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001246- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1247 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1248 called for all requests.
1249
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001250- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1251 they are passed to the compiler.
1252
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001253- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1254 indent, width and depth.
1255
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001256- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1257 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1258
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001259- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1260 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1261
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001262- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1263
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001264- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1265
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001266- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1267
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001268- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1269 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1270
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001271- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001272 for better performance.
1273
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001274- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001275
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001276- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1277 a string).
1278
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001279- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1280
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001281- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1282
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001283- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1284
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001285- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1286
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001287- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1288 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1289 list of fieldnames.
1290
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001291- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1292 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1293
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001294- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1295
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001296- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1297 empty lists.
1298
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001299- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1300 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1301 and shelves.
1302
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001303- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1304 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1305
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001306- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001307 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1308 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001309
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001310- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1311 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001312 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001313
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001314- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001315 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1316 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1317
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001318- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1319 and removed in Py2.4.
1320
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001321- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1322
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001323- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1324
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001325Tools/Demos
1326-----------
1327
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001328- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1329 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1330
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001331- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1332
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001333- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1334 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1335 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1336 destination in situations where both files are given.
1337
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001338- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1339 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1340 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1341 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1342
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001343- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1344
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001345- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1346 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1347 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1348 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1349 now.
1350
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001351- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1352 in effect
1353
1354- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1355 C-c C-h
1356
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001357- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1358 -d option was given.
1359
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001360Build
1361-----
1362
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001363- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1364 build under OS X.
1365
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001366- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1367 --enable-profiling.
1368
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001369- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1370 is configured --with-tsc.
1371
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001372- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1373 on AMD64.
1374
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001375- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1376 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1377
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001378- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1379 removed.
1380
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001381- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1382 supported (see PEP 11).
1383
1384- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1385
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001386- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1387
1388- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1389 (see PEP 11).
1390
1391- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1392 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1393
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001394C API
1395-----
1396
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001397- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1398 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1399 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1400
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001401- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1402 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1403 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1404 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1405
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001406- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1407 generator objects.
1408
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001409- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1410 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001411 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1412 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001413
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001414- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1415 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1416
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001417- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1418 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1419 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1420 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1421 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1422
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001423- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1424 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1425 about 10% faster.
1426
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001427- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1428 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1429
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001430- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1431 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1432 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1433 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1434
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001435Windows
1436-------
1437
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001438- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1439 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1440 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1441 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1442
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001443- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1444 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1445 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1446
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001447
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001448What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1449===============================
1450
1451*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1452
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001453IDLE
1454----
1455
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001456- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1457 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1458 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1459 context-menu actions.
1460
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001461- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1462 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1463 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1464 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1465 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1466 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1467 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1468 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1469 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1470
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001471
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001472What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1473=============================================
1474
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001475*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001476
1477Core and builtins
1478-----------------
1479
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001480- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001481 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001482 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1483
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001484Extension modules
1485-----------------
1486
1487- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1488 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1489 than once. This has been fixed.
1490
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001491- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1492 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1493 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1494 call.
1495
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001496- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1497
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001498Library
1499-------
1500
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001501- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1502 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1503
1504- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1505 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1506 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1507 restored.
1508
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001509IDLE
1510----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001511
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001512- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001513
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001514Build
1515-----
1516
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001517- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1518 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1519
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001520C API
1521-----
1522
1523Windows
1524-------
1525
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001526- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1527 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1528
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001529- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1530
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001531Mac
1532---
1533
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001534- Various fixes to pimp.
1535
1536- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1537
1538- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1539 more problems than it solves.
1540
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001541
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001542What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1543=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001544
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001545*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1546
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001547Core and builtins
1548-----------------
1549
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001550- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1551 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1552
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001553- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1554 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001555 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001556
1557- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1558 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1559 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001560 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001561
1562- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1563 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001564
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001565- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1566 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1567 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1568
1569- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001570 770247.
1571
1572- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001573
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001574Extension modules
1575-----------------
1576
1577- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1578 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1579
1580- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1581
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001582- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1583
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001584- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1585 contained within the _strptime module.
1586
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001587- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1588 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1589
1590- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001591 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1592
1593- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1594 the find_class attribute, if present.
1595
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001596- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001597
1598 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1599 (SF bug 763298).
1600
1601 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001602 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1603 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1604 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001605
1606 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1607
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001608Library
1609-------
1610
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001611- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1612
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001613- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1614 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1615 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1616 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1617 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1618 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1619 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1620 or Tester().
1621
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001622- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1623 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1624 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1625 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1626 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1627 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1628 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1629 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1630 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001631
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001632 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001633
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001634- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1635 weren't before was an oversight.
1636
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001637- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1638 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1639
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001640- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1641 when there are no lines.
1642
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001643- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1644 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1645
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001646- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1647 to child processes.
1648
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001649- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1650
1651- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1652
1653- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1654 xmlrpclib.
1655
1656- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1657 responses.
1658
1659- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1660 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1661
1662- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1663 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1664 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1665
1666- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1667 used as patterns.
1668
1669- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1670 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1671 than Tk 8.3.
1672
1673- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1674
1675- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001676
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001677Tools/Demos
1678-----------
1679
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001680- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1681
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001682- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1683
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001684- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001685
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001686Build
1687-----
1688
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001689- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1690
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001691- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1692
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001693- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1694 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001695
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001696- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1697 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1698 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001699
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001700C API
1701-----
1702
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001703- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1704 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1705
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001706Windows
1707-------
1708
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001709- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1710 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1711 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1712 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1713 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1714 Python exception ::
1715
1716 thread.error: can't start new thread
1717
1718 is raised now.
1719
1720- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1721 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1722 instead of from DLL teardown.
1723
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001724Mac
1725---
1726
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001727- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001728 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001729 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1730 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1731 the executable in the bundle.
1732
1733- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001734
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001735- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1736
1737- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1738 on Panther.
1739
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001740What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1741================================
1742
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001743*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001744
1745Core and builtins
1746-----------------
1747
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001748- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1749 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1750 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1751 with the -i option.
1752
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001753- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1754 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1755
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001756- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1757 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1758
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001759- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1760 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1761 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1762 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1763 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1764 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1765 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1766 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1767 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1768 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1769 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1770 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1771 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001772
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001773- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1774 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1775 embedded in a lambda expression.
1776
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001777- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1778 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1779 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1780 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1781 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1782
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001783- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1784 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1785 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1786
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001787- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1788 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1789
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001790- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1791 It's writable again.
1792
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001793- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1794 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1795 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001796 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001797
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001798- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1799 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1800 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1801
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001802Extension modules
1803-----------------
1804
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001805- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1806 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1807
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001808- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1809 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1810 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1811 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1812
1813- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1814 collection.
1815
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001816- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1817 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1818 unique within a single program run.
1819
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001820- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1821 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1822
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001823- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1824 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1825
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001826- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1827 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001828
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001829- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1830
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001831- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1832 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1833
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001834- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1835 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1836 for many BSD-derived systems.
1837
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001838
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001839Library
1840-------
1841
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001842- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1843 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1844 primary ones:
1845
1846 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1847 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1848 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1849
1850 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1851 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1852 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1853 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1854 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1855 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1856
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001857- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1858 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1859 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1860 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1861 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1862 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1863 argument.
1864
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001865- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1866 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1867 in the archive.
1868
1869- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1870 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1871
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001872- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1873 569574).
1874
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001875- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1876 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1877 no more.
1878
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001879- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1880 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1881 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1882 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1883 code coverage.
1884
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001885- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1886 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1887 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001888 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1889 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001890
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001891- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1892 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1893 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001894 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001895
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001896- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1897
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001898- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1899 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1900 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1901 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1902
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001903- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1904 handling.
1905
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001906- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1907 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1908
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001909- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1910 in socket.py.
1911
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001912- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1913
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001914- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1915 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1916 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1917 opener with proxy support.
1918
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001919- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1920
1921- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1922
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001923Tools/Demos
1924-----------
1925
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001926- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1927
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001928- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1929
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001930- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1931 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001932
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001933- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1934 files.
1935
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001936Build
1937-----
1938
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001939- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001940 different root directory.
1941
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001942C API
1943-----
1944
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001945- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1946 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1947 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1948 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1949 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1950 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1951 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1952 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1953 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1954 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1955
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001956- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1957 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1958 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1959 from Python.
1960
1961
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001962New platforms
1963-------------
1964
1965None this time.
1966
1967Tests
1968-----
1969
1970- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1971 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1972
1973Windows
1974-------
1975
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001976- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1977
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001978- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1979 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1980 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1981 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1982 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1983 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1984 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1985 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1986 that's what it's for.
1987
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001988Mac
1989---
1990
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001991- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1992 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1993 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1994 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001995- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1996 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1997- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001998
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001999SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2000------------------------------------
2001
2002430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2003598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2004622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2005661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2006683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2007697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2008713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2009724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2010727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2011729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2012730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2013731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2014732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2015733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2016735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2017740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2018744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2019745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2020747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2021749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2022751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2023753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2024755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2025757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2026760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2027
2028
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002029What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2030================================
2031
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002032*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002033
2034Core and builtins
2035-----------------
2036
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002037- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2038 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2039
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002040- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2041 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2042 and cannot be strings).
2043
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002044- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2045 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2046 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2047 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2048
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002049- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2050 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2051 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2052 Python itself.
2053
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002054- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2055 the referenced object, if it has one.
2056
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002057- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2058 the thread started at
2059 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2060
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002061- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2062 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2063 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2064 placed on a list index.
2065
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002066- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2067 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2068 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2069 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2070
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002071- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2072 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2073 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2074 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2075 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2076 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2077 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2078
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002079- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2080 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2081 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2082 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2083 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2084
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002085- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2086 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002087
2088- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2089 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2090 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2091 #693195.)
2092
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002093- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2094 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002095
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002096- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002097 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002098 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2099 interpreter executions, would fail.
2100
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002101- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002102 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002103 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002104
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002105Extension modules
2106-----------------
2107
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002108- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2109 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2110 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2111 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2112
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002113- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2114 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2115
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002116- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2117 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2118 and Greg Chapman.)
2119
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002120- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2121 recursively.
2122
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002123- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002124 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2125 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2126 leaks.
2127
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002128- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2129
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002130- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2131 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2132 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2133 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2134 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2135 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2136 #705836.
2137
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002138- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002139 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2140
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002141- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2142 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2143 See SF bug #692416.
2144
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002145- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2146 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2147
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002148- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2149 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2150 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002151
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002152- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002153 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2154 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2155
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002156- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2157 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2158 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2159 timeouts to work properly.
2160
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002161Library
2162-------
2163
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002164- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2165 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2166 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2167 future release.
2168
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002169- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2170 for querying platform dependent features.
2171
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002172- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002173
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002174- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2175 pickle protocol versions.
2176
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002177- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2178 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2179 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2180
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002181- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2182
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002183- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2184 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2185 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2186 modules.
2187
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002188- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2189 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2190 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2191
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002192- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2193 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2194
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002195- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2196 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2197 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2198
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002199- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002200 MS Office extensions.
2201
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002202- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2203 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2204
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002205- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2206 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2207
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002208- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2209 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2210 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2211 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2212 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2213 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2214
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002215- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2216 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2217 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002218
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002219- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2220 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2221 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2222
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002223- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2224
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002225- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2226 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2227 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2228
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002229Tools/Demos
2230-----------
2231
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002232- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2233 See the module docstring for details.
2234
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002235Build
2236-----
2237
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002238- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2239 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002240
2241C API
2242-----
2243
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002244- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2245
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002246- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2247 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2248 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2249
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002250- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2251 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002252
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002253 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2254 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2255 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002256
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002257- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002258 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2259
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002260- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2261 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2262 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002263
2264New platforms
2265-------------
2266
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002267None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002268
2269Tests
2270-----
2271
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002272- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2273 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002274
2275Windows
2276-------
2277
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002278- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2279 function.
2280
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002281- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2282 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002283
2284Mac
2285---
2286
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002287- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2288 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002289
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002290- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2291 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002292
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002293- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2294 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2295 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002296
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002297- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002298 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2299 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002300
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002301- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2302 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002303
2304
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002305What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2306=================================
2307
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002308*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002309
2310Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002311-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002312
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002313- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2314 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2315 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2316
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002317- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2318 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2319 (SF patch #664376.)
2320
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002321- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2322 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2323 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2324 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2325 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2326 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002327 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002328
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002329- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2330 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2331 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2332 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002333 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002334
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002335- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2336 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2337 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2338 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2339 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2340 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2341 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2342 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2343 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2344 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2345 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2346
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002347- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2348 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2349 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2350 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2351 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2352 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2353
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002354- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2355 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2356
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002357- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2358 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2359 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2360 case.)
2361
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002362- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2363 passed as unicode strings.
2364
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002365- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2366 See SF bug #683467.
2367
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002368- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2369 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2370
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002371- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2372
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002373- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2374
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002375- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2376 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2377 arguments.
2378
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002379- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2380 See SF bug #667147.
2381
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002382- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002383 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002384 See SF bug #676155.
2385
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002386- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002387 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002388 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2389 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2390 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2391 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2392 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2393 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002394
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002395Extension modules
2396-----------------
2397
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002398- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2399 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2400 tp_as_number pointer.
2401
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002402- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2403 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2404 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2405 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2406 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2407
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002408- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2409
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002410- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2411
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002412- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002413 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002414 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2415 patch #678531.)
2416
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002417- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2418 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2419
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002420- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2421 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2422
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002423- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2424
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002425- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2426 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2427 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2428
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002429- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2430
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002431- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2432 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2433
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002434- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002435
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002436- datetime changes:
2437
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002438 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2439
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002440 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2441 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2442 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2443 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2444 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2445 now.
2446
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002447 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002448 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2449 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002450
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002451 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002452 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002453 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2454 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2455 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2456 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002457
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002458 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2459 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2460 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002461 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2462
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002463 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2464 by a later example coded by Guido.
2465
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002466 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002467 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2468 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2469 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002470 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2471 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2472
2473 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2474 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2475 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2476 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2477 tzinfo subclass instance.
2478
2479 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2480 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2481 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2482 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2483 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2484 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2485 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2486 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002487
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002488 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2489 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2490 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2491 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2492 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002493 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2494
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002495 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002496
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002497 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2498 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2499 as a naive datetime object.
2500
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002501 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2502 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2503 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2504
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002505 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2506 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2507 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2508 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2509 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2510 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2511 comparison.
2512
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002513 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2514 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2515 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2516 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002517 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002518
2519 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002520
2521 and ::
2522
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002523 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2524
2525 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2526 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2527 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2528 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2529
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002530 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2531 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2532 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2533 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2534 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2535
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002536 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2537 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002538 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2539 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002541Library
2542-------
2543
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002544- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2545 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2546
2547- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2548 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2549 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2550 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2551 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2552 See PEP 307 for details.
2553
2554- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2555 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2556
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002557- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2558 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002559 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002560 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2561 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002562 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002563
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002564- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2565 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2566
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002567- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2568 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2569 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2570
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002571- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2572
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002573- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2574 exception.
2575
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002576- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2577 class.
2578
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002579- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2580 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2581 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2582
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002583- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2584 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2585
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002586- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002587 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2588 See SF bug #659228.
2589
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002590- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2591 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2592 See SF patch #651082.
2593
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002594- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002595
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002596- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2597 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2598
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002599- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002600 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002601
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002602- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2603 DOS paths from other platforms.
2604
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002605Tools/Demos
2606-----------
2607
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002608- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2609 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2610 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2611 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2612 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2613 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2614 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2615 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2616 example:
2617
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002618 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2619 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002620
2621 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2622
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002623
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002624Build
2625-----
2626
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002627- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2628 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2629 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002630 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2631
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002632 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2633
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002634- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2635 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2636 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2637 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2638 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2639 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2640 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2641 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2642 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2643
2644- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2645 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2646 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2647 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2648
2649- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2650 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2651
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002652C API
2653-----
2654
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002655- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2656 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002657
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002658- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2659 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2660 tp_as_number pointer.
2661
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002662- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2663 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2664 (SF #681367)
2665
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002666- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2667 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2668 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2669 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002670
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002671Tests
2672-----
2673
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002674- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002675 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2676 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2677 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2678 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2679 pydoc.)
2680
2681- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2682
2683- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002684
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002685Windows
2686-------
2687
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002688- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2689 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2690 time).
2691
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002692- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2693 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2694
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002695- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2696 release without strong cryptography.
2697
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002698- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002699 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002700
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002701- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2702 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2703
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002704Mac
2705---
2706
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002707- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2708 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002709
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002710- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2711 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2712 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002713
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002714- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2715 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002716
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002717- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2718 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2719 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2720 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002721
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002722- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002723 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2724 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2725 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002726
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002727
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002728What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002729=================================
2730
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002731*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002732
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002733Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002734--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002735
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002736- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2737
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002738- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2739 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002740 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002741 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002742 a different meaning than before.
2743
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002744- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002745 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002746 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002747
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002748- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002749 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002750 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002751
2752- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2753 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2754 and deallocation.
2755
2756- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2757 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2758
2759- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2760 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2761 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2762 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2763 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2764
2765- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2766 now detected by the garbage collector.
2767
2768- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2769 [SF bug 519621]
2770
2771- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2772 identifier.
2773
2774- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2775 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2776 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2777 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2778 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2779 [SF bug 563060]
2780
2781- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2782 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2783 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2784 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2785 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2786
2787- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2788 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2789 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2790
2791- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2792
2793- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2794 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2795 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2796 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2797 state of the slots would be lost.)
2798
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002799Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002800-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002801
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002802- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002803 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2804 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2805 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2806 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002807 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2808 Jython 2.1.
2809
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002810- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002811 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002812 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2813 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2814 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2815 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2816 these, see PEP 302.
2817
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002818- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2819 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2820 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2821
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002822- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2823 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2824 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2825
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002826- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2827 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2828 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2829
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002830- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2831 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2832 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2833 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2834 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2835 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2836 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2837 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2838 releases or implementations.
2839
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002840- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002841 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2842 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002843
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002844- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2845 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2846
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002847- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2848 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2849 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2850
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002851- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2852 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2853
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002854- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2855 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002856 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2857 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002858
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002859- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2860 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2861 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2862 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2863 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2864
2865 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2866 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2867 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2868 pattern.
2869
2870 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2871 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2872 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2873 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2874
2875 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2876 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2877 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2878 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2879 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2880 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2881
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002882- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2883 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2884 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2885 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2886 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2887 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2888 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2889 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002890
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002891- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2892 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2893 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2894 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2895 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002896 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2897 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2898 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2899 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2900 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2901 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2902 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002903
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002904- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2905 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2906
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002907- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2908 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2909 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2910 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2911 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2912 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2913 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2914 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2915 to Zack Weinberg!
2916
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002917- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2918 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2919 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2920 type. This has been fixed now.
2921
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002922- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2923 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2924 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2925
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002926- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2927 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2928 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2929 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2930 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2931 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2932 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2933 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002934 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002935
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002936- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2937 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2938 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002939
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002940- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2941 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2942 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2943 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2944 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2945 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2946 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2947 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002948 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002949 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2950 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2951
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002952- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2953 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2954 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2955 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2956 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2957 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2958 this.)
2959
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002960- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2961 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002962 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002963 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002964 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2965 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002966 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2967 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002968
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002969- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2970 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2971 currently running.
2972
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002973- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2974 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2975 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2976 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2977
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002978- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2979 as directory names.
2980
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002981- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2982 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2983
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002984- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2985 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2986
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002987- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002988 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2989 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002990
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002991- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2992 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2993 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2994 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2995 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2996
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002997- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2998 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2999 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3000 removed.
3001
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003002- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3003 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3004 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3005
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003006- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3007 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3008 to __debug__.
3009
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003010- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3011 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3012 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3013
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003014- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3015 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3016 deprecated now.
3017
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003018- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3019 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3020 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003021
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003022- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3023 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3024 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3025 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3026 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003027
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003028- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3029 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3030
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003031- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3032 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3033 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003034 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003035 is backward compatible.
3036
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003037- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3038 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3039 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3040 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3041 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3042
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003043- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3044 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3045 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3046 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3047 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3048 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003049
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003050- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3051 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3052
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003053- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3054 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3055
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003056- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3057 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3058 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3059 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3060 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3061
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003062- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3063 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3064 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3065
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003066- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003067 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3068
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003069- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3070 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3071 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003072
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003073- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3074 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3075
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003076- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3077 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3078 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3079
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003080- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3081
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003082Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003084
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003085- Added three operators to the operator module:
3086 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3087 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3088 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3089
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003090- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3091
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003092- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3093 archives.
3094
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003095- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3096 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3097 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3098
3099 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3100
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003101- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3102 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3103 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003104 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003105
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003106- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3107 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3108 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3109 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003110 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3111 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3112 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3113 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003114
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003115- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3116 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003117
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003118- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3119
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003120- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3121 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3122
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003123- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3124 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3125 supported.
3126
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003127- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3128
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003129- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3130 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003131
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003132- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3133 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3134
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003135- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3136
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003137- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3138 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3139
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003140- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3141 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3142 functions but callable type objects.
3143
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003144- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003145 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003146 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003147
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003148- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3149 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003150
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003151- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3152 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003153
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003154- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3155 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3156 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3157 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3158
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003159- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3160 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003161
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003162- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3163 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3164 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3165 and __imul__.
3166
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003167- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003168 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3169 is called.
3170
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003171- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3172 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3173 interpreter was compiled.
3174
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003175- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3176 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3177 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003178 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003179 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3180 1, not 2.
3181
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003182- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3183 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3184 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3185 limit.
3186
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003187- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3188 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3189 bug #623464.
3190
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003191- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3192 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3193 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3194 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3195
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003196Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003198
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003199- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3200
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003201- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3202 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3203 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3204 with Python 2.3a2.
3205
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003206- os.path exposes getctime.
3207
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003208- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003209 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003210 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003211 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003212 unit tests of floating point results.
3213
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003214- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3215 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3216 has been increased.
3217
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003218- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3219 executed.
3220
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003221- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3222 postinstallation script.
3223
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003224- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3225 test the current module.
3226
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003227- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003228 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3229 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3230 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3231 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3232
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003233- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003234 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003235 Ward's Optik package.
3236
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003237- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3238 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3239 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3240 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3241
3242- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3243 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003244 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003245
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003246- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3247 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3248 shelf are binary pickles.
3249
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003250- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3251 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3252
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003253- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3254 modules are iterators now.
3255
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003256- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3257 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3258 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3259 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3260 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3261 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003262
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003263- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3264 with their entity value.
3265
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003266- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3267
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003268- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3269 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003270
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003271- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3272 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003273 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003274
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003275- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3276 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3277 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3278 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3279 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3280 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3281 main():
3282
3283 import locale
3284 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3285
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003286- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3287 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3288
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003289- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3290 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3291 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3292 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3293 to the new standard.
3294
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003295- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3296 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3297 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3298 an extension to the database.
3299
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003300- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3301 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3302 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3303 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003304 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003305
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003306- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003307 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003308
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003309- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3310 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3311 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3312 bounded integers.
3313
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003314- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3315 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3316 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3317 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3318 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3319 in existence.
3320
3321 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3322 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3323 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3324 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3325 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3326 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3327
3328 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3329 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3330 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3331 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3332
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003333- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3334 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3335 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3336
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003337- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3338
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003339- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3340 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3341 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3342 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3343
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003344- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3345 argument.
3346
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003347- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3348 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3349 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3350 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3351 [SF patch 560794].
3352
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003353- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3354 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3355 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003356 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3357 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3358 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003359
3360- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3361 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003362
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003363- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3364 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3365 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3366 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003367
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003368- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3369 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3370 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3371 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3372 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3373
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003374- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003375
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003376- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3377
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003378- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3379 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3380 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3381 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3382 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3383 identical to None.
3384
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003385- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3386 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3387 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3388 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3389 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3390 results now.
3391
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003392- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3393 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3394
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003395- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3396 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3397 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3398 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3399 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3400 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3401 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3402 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3403
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003404- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3405
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003406- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3407 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3408
3409- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3410 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3411 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3412 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3413 and other systems.
3414
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003415- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3416 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3417 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3418 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 +00003419 work well with these.
3420
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003421- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3422
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003423- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003424 connections.
3425
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003426- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3427 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3428 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3429
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003430- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3431 sets
3432
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003433- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3434 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3435 name.
3436
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003437- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3438 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3439 passed in.
3440
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003441- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003442 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003443 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3444 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003445
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003446- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3447
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003448- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3449
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003450- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3451 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3452 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3453
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003454- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3455 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3456 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3457 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003458 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003459
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003460- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003461 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003462 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003463
3464- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3465 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3466 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3467
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003468- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003469 the value of its expression argument.
3470
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003471- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3472 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3473 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3474
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003475- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3476 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3477 skipstone browser was included.
3478
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003479- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3480 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3481
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003482Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003483-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003484
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003485- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3486 names in addition to accepting file names.
3487
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003488- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3489 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3490 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3491 still used and useful.)
3492
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003493- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3494 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3495 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3496 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003497
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003498- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3499 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3500 the generated binary.
3501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003502Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003504
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003505- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3506
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003507- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3508 except in the hands of experts.
3509
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003510- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003511 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3512 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3513 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003514
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003515- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3516 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3517 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3518 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3519 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3520 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3521 builds.
3522
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003523- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3524 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3525 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3526 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3527 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3528 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3529 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3530 new type.
3531
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003532- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003533
3534 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3535 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3536 positive infinities.
3537
3538 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3539 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3540 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3541 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3542 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3543 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3544 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3545
3546 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3547
3548 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3549
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003550- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3551 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3552 size of the executable.
3553
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003554- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3555 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3556 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3557 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003558
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003559- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3560
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003561- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3562 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3563 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003564
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003565- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3566 well as Unix.
3567
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003568- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3569 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3570 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3571 modules in the README file for details.
3572
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003573C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003575
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003576- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3577 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003578 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003579 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003580 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003581
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003582- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3583 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3584 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3585 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3586 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3587 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003588 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003589 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3590 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3591 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3592 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3593 aligned.)
3594
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003595- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3596 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3597 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3598
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003599- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3600 level.
3601
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003602- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3603 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3604 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3605 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3606 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3607
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003608- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3609 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3610 code.
3611
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003612- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3613 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3614 adjusting for negative indices.
3615
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003616- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3617 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3618 object.
3619
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003620- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3621 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3622 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3623
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003624- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3625 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003626
3627- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3628
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003629- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3630 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3631 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3632 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3633
3634- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3635
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003636- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003637
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003638- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003639 without going through the buffer API.
3640
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003641- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003642
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003643- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3644 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3645 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3646 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3647
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003648- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3649 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3650
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003651- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003652 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3653
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003654New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003655-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003656
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003657- OpenVMS is now supported.
3658
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003659- AtheOS is now supported.
3660
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003661- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3662
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003663- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3664
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003665Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003666-----
3667
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003668- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3669 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3670 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003671
3672Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003674
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003675- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3676 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3677 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3678 bugs.
3679 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003680 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003681 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3682 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003683 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003684
3685- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003686 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003687
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003688- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3689 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3690
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003691- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3692 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003693 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003694 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3695
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003696- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3697 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3698 use files" uninstall option).
3699
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003700- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3701
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003702- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3703 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3704
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003705- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3706 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3707 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3708
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003709- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3710 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3711 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3712 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3713 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003714 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3715 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3716 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003717
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003718- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003719 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003720 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3721 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3722 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3723 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3724 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3725 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3726 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3727 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3728 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3729 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3730 work around.
3731
3732- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3733 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3734 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3735 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3736 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3737 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3738 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3739 specified with O_CREAT too).
3740
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003741Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742----
3743
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003744- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003745
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003746- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3747 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3748 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3749
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003750- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3751 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3752 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3753
3754- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3755 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3756 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3757 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3758 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3759 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3760 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3761 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003762
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003763- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3764 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3765 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003766
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003767- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3768 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3769 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3770 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3771 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003772
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003773- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3774 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3775 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003776
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003777- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3778 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003779
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003780- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3781 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3782 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3783 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3784 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003785
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003786- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3787 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3788 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3789
3790- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3791 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3792 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003793
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003794- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3795 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3796 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3797 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003798 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003799
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003800- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3801 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003802
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003803- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3804 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003805
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003806- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003807 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003808 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3809 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003810
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003811
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003812What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003813===============================
3814
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3816
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003817Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003819
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003820- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3821 with a custom metaclass.
3822
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003823Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003824-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003825
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003826- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3827 are proxies.
3828
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003829Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003830-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003831
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003832- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3833 very short strings.
3834
3835- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3836 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3837 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3838 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3839 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3840
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003841Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003842-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003843
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003844- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3845 close or delete time).
3846
3847- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3848 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3849
3850- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3851
3852- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003853 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003854
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003855Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003856-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003857
3858Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003860
3861C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003863
3864New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003865-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003866
3867Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003868-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003869
3870Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003872
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003873- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3874
3875- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3876 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3877
3878- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3879 deleted at process exit time.
3880
3881- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3882 in backslash.
3883
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003884Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003885----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003886
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003887- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3888 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3889 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3890
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003891
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003892What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003893===========================
3894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003895*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3896
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003897Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003899
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003900- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3901 been extensively updated. See
3902
3903 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3904
3905 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3906
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003907- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3908 deleted!
3909
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003910- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3911 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3912 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3913 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3914 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3915
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003916- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3917
3918 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3919 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3920
3921 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3922 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3923 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3924 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3925 supported anyway.
3926
3927 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3928 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3929
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003930- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3931 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3932 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3933 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3934 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003935
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003936- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3937 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3938 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3939
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003940Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003941-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003942
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003943- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3944 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3945 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3946 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3947 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3948 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003949 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3950 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3951 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3952 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003953
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003954- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3955 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3956 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3957
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003958Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003960
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003961- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3962
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003963Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003965
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003966- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3967 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3968 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3969 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3970 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3971 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3972
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003973- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3974
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003975- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3976
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003977- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3978
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003979- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3980 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3981 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3982
3983- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3984
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003985Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003987
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003988- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3989 off a search on Google.
3990
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003991Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003993
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003994- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3995 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3996 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3997 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3998 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3999 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4000 other platforms should do likewise.
4001
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004002- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4003 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4004 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4005
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004006C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004008
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004009- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4010 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4011 producing key-value pairs.
4012
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004013- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004014 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004015 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4016 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4017 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4018 previously went unchallenged.
4019
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004020New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004021-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004022
4023Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004024-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004025
4026Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004028
4029Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004031
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004032- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4033 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004034
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004035- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4036 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4037 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4038 home.
4039
4040
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004041What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004042===========================
4043
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4045
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004046Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004048
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004049- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4050 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004051
4052 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004053 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004054
4055 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4056 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004057 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004058 This needs to be documented.
4059
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004060- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4061 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4062
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004063- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4064 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4065 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4066
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004067- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4068 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4069
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004070- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4071 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4072 class forbids it).
4073
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004074- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4075 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4076 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4077
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004078- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4079
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004080Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004082
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004083- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4084 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004085 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004086
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004087- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4088 (like 1 + '').
4089
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004090Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004092
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004093- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4094 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4095 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4096 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004097 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004098 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4099
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004100- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4101 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4102 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4103 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4104
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004105- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4106 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004107 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4108 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4109 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004110
4111- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4112 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004113
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004114- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4115 bytes on its input.
4116
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004117Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004118-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004119
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004120- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004121 convenience function.
4122
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004123- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4124 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4125 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004126 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4127 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4128 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4129 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4130 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4131 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004132
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004133- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4134 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4135 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4136 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4137
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004138- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4139 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4140 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4141
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004142- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4143 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4144 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4145 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4146
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004147- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4148 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004150 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4151 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4152 new -l and -e options.
4153
4154- statcache is now deprecated.
4155
4156- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4157 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004159 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4160 time properly taken into account.
4161
4162- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4163 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4164 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4165 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4166
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004167Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004168-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004169
4170Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004172
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004173- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4174 is built with libdb3 if available.
4175
4176- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4177
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004178C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004180
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004181- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4182 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4183 PySequence_Size().
4184
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004185- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4186
4187- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4188 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4189 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4190
4191- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4192 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4193
4194- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4195 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4196
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004197New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004198-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004199
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004200- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4201 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4202
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004203- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4204 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4205
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004206- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4207
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004208Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004209-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004210
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004211- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4212 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4213
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004214Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004216
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004217Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004219
4220- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4221 removed completely in the next release.
4222
4223- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4224 OSX.
4225
4226- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4227 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4228
4229- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4230
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004231
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004232What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004233===========================
4234
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4236
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004237Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004239
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004240- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004241 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004242 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004243 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4244 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004245 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4246 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004247 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4248 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004249
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004250- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4251 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4252
4253- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4254 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4255
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004256Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004258
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004259- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4260 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4261 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4262 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4263 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4264 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4265 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4266 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4267
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004268- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4269 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4270 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4271 example).
4272
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004273- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004274 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004275 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004276 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004277
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004278- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4279 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4280 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004281 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004282
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004283- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4284 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4285 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4286 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4287 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4288 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4289
4290 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4291
4292 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4293
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004294Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004296
4297- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4298
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004299- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4300
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004301- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4302 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004303
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004304- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4305 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4306 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4307 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4308 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4309 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004310 attributes.
4311
4312- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4313 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4314 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004315
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004316- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4317 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4318 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004319
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004320- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4321 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4322 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004323 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4324 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4325
4326- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4327 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004328
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004331
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004332- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4333 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4334
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004335- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4336 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4337 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4338 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4339
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004340- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4341 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4342 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4343 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4344
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004345 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4346 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4347 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4348 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4349 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4350 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4351 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4352 without losing information).
4353
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004354- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004355 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4356 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4357 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4358 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4359 module).
4360
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004361 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004362 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4363 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4364 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4365 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004366
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004367- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004368 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4369 encoding.
4370
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004371- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4372 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4373
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004374- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004375 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4376
4377- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4378 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4379 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4380 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4381
4382- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4383
4384- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4385 ON, and OFF.
4386
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004387- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4388 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4389
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004390Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004392
4393- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4394 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4395 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004396
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004397- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4398 been added: -X and -E.
4399
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004400Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004402
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004403- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4404 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4405
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004406C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004408
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004409- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4410 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4411 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4412 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4413 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4414
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004415- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4416 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4417 as long) arguments.
4418
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004419- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4420 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4421 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4422 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4423 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4424 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4425
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004426- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4427 input.
4428
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004429New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004431
4432Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004434
4435Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004437
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004438- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4439 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4440 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4441
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004442- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4443 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4444 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004445 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004446
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4448 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4449 import signal
4450 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004451
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004453 while 1:
4454 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004456 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4457 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4458 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4459 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004460
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004461
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004462What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4463===========================
4464
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4466
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004467Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004469
4470- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4471 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4472 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4473
4474- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4475 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4476 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4477 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4478 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4479 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4480 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004481
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004482- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004483 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004484 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4485 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4486 associate a docstring with a property.
4487
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004488- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4489 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4490 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4491 other built-in object types.
4492
4493- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4494 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4495 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4496 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4497 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4498
4499- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4500 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4501
4502- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4503 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004504 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004505 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4506 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4507 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4508 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4509 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4510
4511- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4512 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4513 class.
4514
4515- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4516 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4517 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4518 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4519
4520- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4521 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4522 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4523 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4524
4525- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4526 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4527
4528- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4529 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4530 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4531 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4532 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004533 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004534 with the same value as s.
4535
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004536- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4537
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004538Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004540
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004541- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4542
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004543- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4544 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4545 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4546 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4547 objects.
4548
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004549- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4550 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004551 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4552 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4553
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004554- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4555 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4556 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4557
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004558Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004560
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004561- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4562 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4563 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4564 by the instances.
4565
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004566- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4567 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4568 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4569
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004570- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4571 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4572 before the entire comparison is complete.
4573
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004574- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4575 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4576 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4577
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004578- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4579 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4580 getwriter().
4581
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004582- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4583 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4584
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004585- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004586 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4587 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4588
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004589- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4590 iterable object.
4591
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004592- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4593 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004594
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004595- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4596 authentication.
4597
4598- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4599 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004600
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004601- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004602 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4603 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4604 a sample driver.)
4605
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004606Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004607-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004608
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004609- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4610 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4611 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4612 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4613 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4614 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4615 kernel has large file support.
4616
4617- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4618 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4619 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4620 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4621 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4622
4623- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4624 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4625 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4626
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004627C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004629
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004630- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4631 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4632
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004633New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004635
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004636- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4637 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4638
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004639Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004640-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004641
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004642- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4643 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4644 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4645 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4646 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4647
4648- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4649 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4650 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4651 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4652
4653- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4654 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4655
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004656Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004657-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004658
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004659- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004660 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4661 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004662
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004663
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004664What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4665===========================
4666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004667*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4668
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004669Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004671
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004672- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4673 big to represent as a C double.
4674
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004675- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4676 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4677 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4678 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4679 restriction).
4680
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004681- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4682 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4683 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4684 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4685 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4686
4687 >>> dir([])
4688 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4689 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4690 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4691 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4692 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4693 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4694 'reverse', 'sort']
4695
4696 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4697
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004698- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004699 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4700 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4701 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4702 OverflowError exception.
4703
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004704- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004705 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004706 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4707 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4708 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4709 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4710 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004711 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4713 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4714
4715 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4716 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4717 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4718 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004719
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004720- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004721 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4722 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4723 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4724 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4725 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4726 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4727 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4728 once it is created.
4729
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004730- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4731 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4732 (key, value) pairs.
4733
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004734- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004735 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4736 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4737
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004738- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4739 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4740 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4741 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4742 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004743
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004744- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004745 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4746 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4747
4748 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4749
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004750- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004751 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4752
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004753Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004755
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004756- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004757 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4758 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004759
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004760- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4761 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4762 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4763 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4764 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4765 in this area anymore).
4766
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004767- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4768 threading.Timer.
4769
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004770- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4771 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4772
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004773- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004774 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4775
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004776- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004777 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4778 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4779 converted to Python longs.
4780
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004781- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004782 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4783
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004784- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4785 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4786 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4787
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004788Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004789-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004790
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004791- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4792 division operators as per PEP 238.
4793
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004794Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004796
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004797- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4798 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4799 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4800 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4801
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004802C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004804
4805- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004806
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004807- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4808 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004809 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004811 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4812 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004813 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004815
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004816- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004817 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4818 module:
4819
4820 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004821
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004822 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4823 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004824
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004825 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4826 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004827
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004828 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4829
4830 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4831
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004832- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004833 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4834 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4835 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004836
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004837New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004839
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004840- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4841 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4842 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4843 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4844 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004845
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004846Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004848
4849Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004850-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004851
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004852- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4853 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4854 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4855 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004856 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4857 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4858 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4859 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4860 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004861
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004862- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004863 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4864
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004865
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004866What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4867===========================
4868
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004869*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4870
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004871Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004873
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004874- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4875 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4876
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004877- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4878 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4879 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004880
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004881- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4882 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4883 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4884 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004885
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004886- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4887
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004889
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004890Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004891-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004892
4893- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004894 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004895 the module docstring for details.
4896
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004897Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004898-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004899
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004900- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004901 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4902 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4903 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004904
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004905- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4906 Nick Mathewson.
4907
4908Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004909----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004910
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004911- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4912 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4913 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4914 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4915 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4916 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4917 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4918 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4919
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004920- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4921 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4922 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4923 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4924
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004925- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4926 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4927 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4928 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4929 come a long way).
4930
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004931- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4932 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4933 write filters for these warnings).
4934
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004935- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4936 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4937 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4938 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4939 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4940
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004941- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4942 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4943 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4944 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4945 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4946 older distribution.
4947
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004948Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004949-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004950
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004951- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4952 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004953 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004954
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004955- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4956 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4957 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4958
4959- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4960
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004961- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4962
4963- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4964
4965- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4966
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004967- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004968
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004969- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4970
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004971New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004973
4974C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004975-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004976
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004977- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4978 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4979 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4980 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4981 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4982 against buffer overruns.
4983
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004984- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004985 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4986 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004987 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4988 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4989 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4990
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004991- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4992 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4993 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4994 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4995 deprecated.
4996
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004997Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004999
5000- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5001 relevant is found.
5002
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005003
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005004What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005005===========================
5006
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005007*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5008
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005009Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005010----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005011
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005012- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5013 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5014 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5015 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5016 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5017 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5018 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5019 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005020 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005021 repaired.
5022
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005023- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005024 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005025 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5026 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5027 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5028 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5029 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5030 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5031 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5032 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5033
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005034- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5035 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5036 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5037 leading BMO character).
5038
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005039- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5040 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5041 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5042
5043 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5044 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5045 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005046
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005047 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5048 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5049 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5050 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5051 for various simple to use conversions.
5052
5053 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5054 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5055
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5057 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5058 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5059 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5060 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5061 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5062 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5063 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5064 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5065 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5066 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5067 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5068 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5069 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5070 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005071
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005072- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5073 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5074 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005075 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005076 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005077
5078 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005079 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5080 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5081 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5082 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5083 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005084 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5085 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005086
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005087 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5088 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5089 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005090 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005091
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005092- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5093 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5094 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5095 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5096 floating arithmetic,
5097
5098 x = 9007199254740992.0
5099 print long(x)
5100
5101 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5102 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5103 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5104 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5105 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5106 functions are of good quality).
5107
5108 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5109 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5110 algorithms to break.
5111
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005112- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5113 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5114 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5115 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5116 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5117 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5118 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5119 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5120 order.
5121
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005122- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5123 operation along the most common code paths.
5124
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005125- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5126 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5127
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005128- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5129 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5130 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5131 {}.update(UserDict())
5132
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005133- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5134 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5135 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5136 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5137 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5138 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5139 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5140 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5141
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005142- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005143 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005144
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005145 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005146 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5147 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005148 join() method of strings
5149 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005150 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5151 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005153 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005154
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005155- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5156 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5157
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005158- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5159 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5160
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005161- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5162 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5163 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5164 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5165
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005166- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5167 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005168 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005169 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5170 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005171
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005172- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5173
5174
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005175Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005176-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005177
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005178- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005179 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005180 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5181 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5182
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005183- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5184 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5185
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005186- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5187 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5188 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5189 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5190
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005191- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5192 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5193 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5194
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005195- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5196
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005197- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5198
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005199- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5200 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5201 that are still imported into string.py).
5202
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005203- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5204
5205- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5206 Now it does.
5207
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005208- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5209
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005210- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5211 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5212 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5213 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5214 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005215 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5216 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005217
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005218- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5219 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5220 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5221 'help(object)'.
5222
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005223Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005224-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005225
5226- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005227 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005228 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5229 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5230
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005231- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005232 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5233 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005234
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005235C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005236-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005237
5238- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5239 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005240
5241----
5242
5243**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**