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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
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +000015- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
16 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
17 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
18 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
19 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
20 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
21 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
22 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
23 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
24 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
25 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
26 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
27 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +000028
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +000029- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
30 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
31 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
32 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
33 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
34
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +000035- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
36 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
37
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +000038- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
39 It's writable again.
40
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +000041- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
42 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
43 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
44 preferred, then __iter__ can be overriden.
45
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000046Extension modules
47-----------------
48
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +000049- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
50 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
51
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +000052- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
53 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +000054
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +000055- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
56
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000057- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
58 Fixes SF bug #730685.
59
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +000060- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
61 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
62 for many BSD-derived systems.
63
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000064Library
65-------
66
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +000067- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
68
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +000069- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
70 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
71 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
72 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
73
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +000074- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
75 handling.
76
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +000077- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
78 __doc__ of data descriptors.
79
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +000080- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
81 in socket.py.
82
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +000083- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
84
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +000085- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
86 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
87 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
88 opener with proxy support.
89
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000090Tools/Demos
91-----------
92
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +000093- diff.py is a new script for print file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff
94 formats. Provides an alternate command line interface to difflib.py.
95
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +000096- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
97 files.
98
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000099Build
100-----
101
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000102- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
103 different root directory.
104
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000105C API
106-----
107
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000108- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
109 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
110 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
111 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
112 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
113 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
114 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
115 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
116 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
117 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
118
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000119New platforms
120-------------
121
122None this time.
123
124Tests
125-----
126
127- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
128 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
129
130Windows
131-------
132
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000133- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
134 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
135 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
136 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
137 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
138 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
139 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
140 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
141 that's what it's for.
142
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000143Mac
144---
145
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000146- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
147 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
148 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
149 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000150
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000151What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
152================================
153
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000154*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000155
156Core and builtins
157-----------------
158
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000159- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
160 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
161
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000162- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
163 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
164 and cannot be strings).
165
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000166- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
167 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
168 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
169 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
170
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000171- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
172 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
173 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
174 Python itself.
175
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000176- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
177 the referenced object, if it has one.
178
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000179- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
180 the thread started at
181 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
182
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000183- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
184 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
185 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
186 placed on a list index.
187
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000188- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
189 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
190 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
191 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
192
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000193- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
194 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
195 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
196 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
197 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
198 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
199 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
200
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000201- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
202 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
203 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
204 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
205 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
206
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000207- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
208 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000209
210- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
211 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
212 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
213 #693195.)
214
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000215- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
216 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000217
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000218- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000219 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000220 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
221 interpreter executions, would fail.
222
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000223- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000224 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000225 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000226
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000227Extension modules
228-----------------
229
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000230- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
231 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
232 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
233 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
234
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000235- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
236 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
237
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000238- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
239 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
240 and Greg Chapman.)
241
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000242- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
243 recursively.
244
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000245- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000246 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
247 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
248 leaks.
249
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000250- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
251
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000252- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
253 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
254 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
255 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
256 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
257 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
258 #705836.
259
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000260- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
261 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
262
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000263- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
264 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
265 See SF bug #692416.
266
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000267- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
268 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
269
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000270- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
271 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
272 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000273
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000274- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000275 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
276 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
277
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000278- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
279 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
280 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
281 timeouts to work properly.
282
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000283Library
284-------
285
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000286- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
287 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
288 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
289 future release.
290
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000291- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
292 for querying platform dependent features.
293
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000294- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000295
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000296- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
297 pickle protocol versions.
298
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000299- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
300 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
301 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
302
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000303- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
304
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000305- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
306 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
307 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
308 modules.
309
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000310- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
311 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
312 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
313
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000314- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
315 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
316
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000317- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
318 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
319 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
320
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000321- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000322 MS Office extensions.
323
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000324- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
325 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
326
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000327- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
328 execution speed of expressions and statements.
329
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000330- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
331 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
332 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
333 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
334 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
335 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
336
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000337- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
338 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
339 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000340
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000341- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
342 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
343 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
344
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000345- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
346
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000347- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
348 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
349 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
350
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000351Tools/Demos
352-----------
353
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000354- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
355 See the module docstring for details.
356
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000357Build
358-----
359
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000360- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
361 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000362
363C API
364-----
365
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000366- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
367
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000368- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
369 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
370 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
371
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000372- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
373 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000374
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000375 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
376 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
377 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000378
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000379- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000380 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
381
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000382- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
383 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
384 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000385
386New platforms
387-------------
388
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000389None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000390
391Tests
392-----
393
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000394- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
395 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000396
397Windows
398-------
399
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000400- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
401 function.
402
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000403- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
404 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000405
406Mac
407---
408
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000409- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
410 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000411
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000412- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
413 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000414
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000415- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
416 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
417 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000418
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000419- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000420 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
421 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000422
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000423- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
424 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000425
426
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000427What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
428=================================
429
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000430*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000431
432Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000433-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000434
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000435- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
436 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
437 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
438
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000439- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
440 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
441 (SF patch #664376.)
442
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000443- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
444 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
445 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
446 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
447 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
448 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000449 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000450
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000451- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
452 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
453 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
454 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000455 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000456
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000457- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
458 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
459 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
460 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
461 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
462 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
463 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
464 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
465 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
466 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
467 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
468
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000469- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
470 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
471 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
472 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
473 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
474 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
475
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000476- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
477 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
478
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000479- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
480 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
481 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
482 case.)
483
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000484- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
485 passed as unicode strings.
486
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000487- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
488 See SF bug #683467.
489
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000490- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
491 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
492
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000493- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
494
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000495- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
496
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000497- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
498 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
499 arguments.
500
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000501- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
502 See SF bug #667147.
503
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000504- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000505 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000506 See SF bug #676155.
507
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000508- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000509 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000510 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
511 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
512 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
513 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
514 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
515 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000516
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000517Extension modules
518-----------------
519
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000520- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
521 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
522 tp_as_number pointer.
523
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000524- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
525 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
526 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
527 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
528 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
529
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000530- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
531
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000532- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
533
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000534- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000535 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000536 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
537 patch #678531.)
538
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000539- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
540 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
541
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000542- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
543 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
544
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000545- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
546
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000547- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
548 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
549 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
550
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000551- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
552
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000553- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
554 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
555
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000556- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000557
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000558- datetime changes:
559
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000560 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
561
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000562 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
563 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
564 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
565 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
566 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
567 now.
568
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000569 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000570 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
571 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000572
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000573 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000574 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000575 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
576 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
577 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
578 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000579
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000580 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
581 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
582 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000583 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
584
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000585 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
586 by a later example coded by Guido.
587
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000588 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000589 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
590 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
591 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000592 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
593 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
594
595 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
596 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
597 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
598 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
599 tzinfo subclass instance.
600
601 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
602 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
603 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
604 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
605 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
606 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
607 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
608 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000609
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000610 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
611 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
612 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
613 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
614 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000615 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
616
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000617 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000618
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000619 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
620 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
621 as a naive datetime object.
622
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000623 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
624 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
625 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
626
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000627 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
628 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
629 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
630 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
631 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
632 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
633 comparison.
634
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000635 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
636 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
637 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
638 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000639 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000640
641 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000642
643 and ::
644
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000645 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
646
647 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
648 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
649 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
650 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
651
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000652 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
653 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
654 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
655 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
656 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
657
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000658 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
659 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000660 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
661 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000662
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000663Library
664-------
665
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000666- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
667 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
668
669- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
670 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
671 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
672 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
673 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
674 See PEP 307 for details.
675
676- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
677 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
678
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000679- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
680 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000681 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000682 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
683 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000684 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000685
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000686- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
687 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
688
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000689- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
690 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
691 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
692
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000693- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
694
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000695- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
696 exception.
697
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000698- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
699 class.
700
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000701- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
702 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
703 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
704
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000705- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
706 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
707
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000708- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000709 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
710 See SF bug #659228.
711
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000712- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
713 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
714 See SF patch #651082.
715
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000716- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000717
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000718- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
719 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
720
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000721- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000722 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000723
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000724- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
725 DOS paths from other platforms.
726
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000727Tools/Demos
728-----------
729
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000730- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
731 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
732 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
733 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
734 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
735 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
736 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
737 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
738 example:
739
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000740 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
741 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000742
743 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
744
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000745
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000746Build
747-----
748
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000749- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
750 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
751 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000752 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
753
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000754 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
755
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000756- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
757 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
758 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
759 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
760 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
761 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
762 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
763 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
764 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
765
766- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
767 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
768 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
769 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
770
771- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
772 from the Tools/scripts directory.
773
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000774C API
775-----
776
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000777- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
778 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000779
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000780- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
781 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
782 tp_as_number pointer.
783
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000784- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
785 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
786 (SF #681367)
787
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000788- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
789 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
790 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
791 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000792
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000793Tests
794-----
795
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000796- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000797 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
798 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
799 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
800 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
801 pydoc.)
802
803- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
804
805- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000806
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000807Windows
808-------
809
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000810- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
811 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
812 time).
813
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000814- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
815 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
816
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000817- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
818 release without strong cryptography.
819
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000820- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000821 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000822
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000823- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
824 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
825
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000826Mac
827---
828
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000829- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
830 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000831
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000832- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
833 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
834 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000835
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000836- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
837 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000838
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000839- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
840 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
841 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
842 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000843
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000844- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000845 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
846 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
847 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000848
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000849
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000850What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000851=================================
852
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000853*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000854
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000855Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000856--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000857
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000858- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
859
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000860- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
861 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000862 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000863 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000864 a different meaning than before.
865
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000866- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000867 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000868 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000869
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000870- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000871 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000872 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000873
874- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
875 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
876 and deallocation.
877
878- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
879 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
880
881- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
882 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
883 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
884 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
885 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
886
887- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
888 now detected by the garbage collector.
889
890- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
891 [SF bug 519621]
892
893- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
894 identifier.
895
896- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
897 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
898 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
899 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
900 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
901 [SF bug 563060]
902
903- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
904 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
905 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
906 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
907 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
908
909- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
910 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
911 not called. [SF bug #537450]
912
913- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
914
915- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
916 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
917 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
918 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
919 state of the slots would be lost.)
920
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000921Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000922-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000923
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000924- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000925 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
926 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
927 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
928 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000929 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
930 Jython 2.1.
931
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000932- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000933 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000934 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
935 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
936 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
937 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
938 these, see PEP 302.
939
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000940- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
941 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
942 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
943
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000944- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
945 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
946 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
947
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000948- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
949 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
950 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
951
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000952- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
953 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
954 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
955 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
956 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
957 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
958 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
959 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
960 releases or implementations.
961
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000962- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000963 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
964 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000965
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000966- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
967 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
968
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000969- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
970 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
971 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
972
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000973- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
974 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
975
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000976- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
977 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000978 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
979 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000980
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000981- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
982 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
983 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
984 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
985 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
986
987 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
988 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
989 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
990 pattern.
991
992 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
993 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
994 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
995 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
996
997 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
998 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
999 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1000 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1001 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1002 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1003
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001004- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1005 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1006 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1007 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1008 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1009 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1010 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1011 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001012
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001013- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1014 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1015 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1016 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1017 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001018 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1019 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1020 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1021 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1022 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1023 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1024 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001025
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001026- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1027 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1028
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001029- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1030 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1031 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1032 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1033 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1034 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1035 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1036 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1037 to Zack Weinberg!
1038
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001039- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1040 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1041 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1042 type. This has been fixed now.
1043
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001044- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1045 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1046 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1047
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001048- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1049 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1050 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1051 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1052 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1053 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1054 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1055 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001056 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001057
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001058- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1059 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1060 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001061
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001062- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1063 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1064 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1065 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1066 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1067 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1068 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1069 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001070 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001071 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1072 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1073
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001074- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1075 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1076 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1077 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1078 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1079 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1080 this.)
1081
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001082- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1083 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001084 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001085 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001086 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1087 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001088 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1089 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001090
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001091- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1092 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1093 currently running.
1094
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001095- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1096 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1097 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1098 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1099
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001100- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1101 as directory names.
1102
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001103- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1104 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1105
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001106- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1107 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1108
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001109- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001110 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1111 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001112
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001113- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1114 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1115 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1116 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1117 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1118
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001119- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1120 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1121 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1122 removed.
1123
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001124- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1125 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1126 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1127
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001128- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1129 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1130 to __debug__.
1131
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001132- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1133 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1134 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1135
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001136- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1137 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1138 deprecated now.
1139
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001140- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1141 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1142 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001143
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001144- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1145 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1146 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1147 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1148 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001149
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001150- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1151 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1152
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001153- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1154 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1155 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001156 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001157 is backward compatible.
1158
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001159- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1160 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1161 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1162 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1163 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1164
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001165- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1166 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1167 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1168 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1169 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1170 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001171
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001172- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1173 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1174
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001175- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1176 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1177
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001178- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1179 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1180 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1181 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1182 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1183
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001184- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1185 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1186 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1187
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001188- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001189 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1190
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001191- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1192 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1193 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001194
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001195- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1196 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1197
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001198- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1199 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1200 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1201
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001202- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1203
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001204Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001205-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001206
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001207- Added three operators to the operator module:
1208 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1209 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1210 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1211
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001212- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1213
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001214- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1215 archives.
1216
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001217- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1218 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1219 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1220
1221 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1222
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001223- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1224 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1225 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001226 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001227
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001228- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1229 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1230 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1231 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001232 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1233 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1234 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1235 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001236
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001237- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1238 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001239
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001240- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1241
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001242- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1243 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1244
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001245- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1246 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1247 supported.
1248
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001249- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1250
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001251- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1252 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001253
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001254- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1255 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1256
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001257- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1258
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001259- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1260 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1261
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001262- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1263 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1264 functions but callable type objects.
1265
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001266- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001267 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001268 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001269
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001270- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1271 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001272
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001273- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1274 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001275
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001276- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1277 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1278 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1279 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1280
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001281- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1282 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001283
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001284- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1285 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1286 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1287 and __imul__.
1288
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001289- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001290 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1291 is called.
1292
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001293- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1294 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1295 interpreter was compiled.
1296
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001297- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1298 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1299 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001300 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001301 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1302 1, not 2.
1303
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001304- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1305 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1306 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1307 limit.
1308
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001309- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1310 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1311 bug #623464.
1312
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001313- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1314 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1315 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1316 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1317
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001318Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001319-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001320
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001321- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1322
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001323- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1324 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1325 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1326 with Python 2.3a2.
1327
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001328- os.path exposes getctime.
1329
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001330- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001331 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001332 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001333 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001334 unit tests of floating point results.
1335
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001336- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1337 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1338 has been increased.
1339
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001340- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1341 executed.
1342
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001343- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1344 postinstallation script.
1345
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001346- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1347 test the current module.
1348
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001349- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001350 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1351 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1352 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1353 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1354
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001355- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001356 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001357 Ward's Optik package.
1358
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001359- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1360 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1361 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1362 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1363
1364- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1365 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001366 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001367
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001368- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1369 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1370 shelf are binary pickles.
1371
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001372- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1373 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1374
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001375- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1376 modules are iterators now.
1377
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001378- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1379 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1380 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1381 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1382 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1383 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001384
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001385- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1386 with their entity value.
1387
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001388- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1389
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001390- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1391 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001392
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001393- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1394 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001395 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001396
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001397- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1398 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1399 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1400 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1401 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1402 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1403 main():
1404
1405 import locale
1406 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1407
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001408- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1409 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1410
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001411- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1412 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1413 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1414 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1415 to the new standard.
1416
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001417- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1418 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1419 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1420 an extension to the database.
1421
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001422- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1423 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1424 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1425 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001426 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001427
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001428- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001429 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001430
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001431- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1432 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1433 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1434 bounded integers.
1435
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001436- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1437 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1438 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1439 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1440 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1441 in existence.
1442
1443 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1444 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1445 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1446 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1447 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1448 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1449
1450 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1451 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1452 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1453 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1454
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001455- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1456 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1457 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1458
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001459- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1460
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001461- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1462 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1463 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1464 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1465
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001466- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1467 argument.
1468
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001469- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1470 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1471 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1472 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1473 [SF patch 560794].
1474
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001475- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1476 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1477 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001478 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1479 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1480 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001481
1482- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1483 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001484
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001485- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1486 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1487 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1488 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001489
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001490- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1491 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1492 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1493 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1494 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1495
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001496- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001497
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001498- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1499
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001500- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1501 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1502 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1503 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1504 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1505 identical to None.
1506
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001507- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1508 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1509 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1510 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1511 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1512 results now.
1513
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001514- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1515 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1516
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001517- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1518 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1519 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1520 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1521 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1522 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1523 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1524 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1525
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001526- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1527
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001528- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1529 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1530
1531- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1532 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1533 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1534 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1535 and other systems.
1536
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001537- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1538 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1539 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1540 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 +00001541 work well with these.
1542
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001543- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1544
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001545- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001546 connections.
1547
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001548- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1549 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1550 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1551
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001552- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1553 sets
1554
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001555- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1556 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1557 name.
1558
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001559- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1560 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1561 passed in.
1562
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001563- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001564 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001565 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1566 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001567
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001568- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1569
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001570- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1571
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001572- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1573 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1574 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1575
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001576- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1577 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1578 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1579 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001580 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001581
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001582- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001583 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001584 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001585
1586- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1587 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1588 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1589
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001590- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001591 the value of its expression argument.
1592
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001593- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1594 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1595 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1596
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001597- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1598 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1599 skipstone browser was included.
1600
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001601- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1602 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1603
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001604Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001605-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001606
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001607- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1608 names in addition to accepting file names.
1609
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001610- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1611 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1612 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1613 still used and useful.)
1614
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001615- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1616 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1617 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1618 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001619
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001620- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1621 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1622 the generated binary.
1623
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001624Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001625-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001626
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001627- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1628
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001629- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1630 except in the hands of experts.
1631
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001632- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001633 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1634 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1635 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001636
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001637- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1638 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1639 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1640 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1641 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1642 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1643 builds.
1644
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001645- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1646 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1647 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1648 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1649 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1650 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1651 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1652 new type.
1653
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001654- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001655
1656 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1657 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1658 positive infinities.
1659
1660 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1661 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1662 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1663 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1664 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1665 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1666 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1667
1668 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1669
1670 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1671
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001672- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1673 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1674 size of the executable.
1675
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001676- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1677 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1678 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1679 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001680
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001681- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1682
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001683- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1684 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1685 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001686
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001687- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1688 well as Unix.
1689
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001690- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1691 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1692 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1693 modules in the README file for details.
1694
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001695C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001696-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001697
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001698- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1699 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001700 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001701 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001702 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001703
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001704- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1705 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1706 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1707 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1708 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1709 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001710 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001711 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1712 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1713 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1714 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1715 aligned.)
1716
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001717- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1718 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1719 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1720
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001721- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1722 level.
1723
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001724- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1725 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1726 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1727 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1728 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1729
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001730- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1731 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1732 code.
1733
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001734- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1735 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1736 adjusting for negative indices.
1737
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001738- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1739 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1740 object.
1741
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001742- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1743 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1744 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1745
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001746- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1747 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001748
1749- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1750
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001751- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1752 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1753 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1754 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1755
1756- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1757
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001758- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001759
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001760- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001761 without going through the buffer API.
1762
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001763- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001764
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001765- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1766 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1767 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1768 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1769
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001770- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1771 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1772
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001773- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001774 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1775
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001776New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001777-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001778
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001779- OpenVMS is now supported.
1780
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001781- AtheOS is now supported.
1782
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001783- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1784
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001785- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1786
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001787Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001788-----
1789
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001790- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1791 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1792 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001793
1794Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001795-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001796
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001797- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1798 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1799 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1800 bugs.
1801 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001802 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001803 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1804 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001805 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001806
1807- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001808 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001809
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001810- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1811 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1812
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001813- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1814 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001815 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001816 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1817
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001818- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1819 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1820 use files" uninstall option).
1821
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001822- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1823
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001824- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1825 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1826
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001827- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1828 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1829 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1830
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001831- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1832 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1833 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1834 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1835 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001836 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1837 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1838 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001839
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001840- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001841 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001842 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1843 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1844 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1845 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1846 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1847 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1848 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1849 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1850 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1851 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1852 work around.
1853
1854- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1855 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1856 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1857 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1858 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1859 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1860 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1861 specified with O_CREAT too).
1862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001863Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001864----
1865
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001866- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001867
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001868- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1869 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1870 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1871
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001872- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1873 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1874 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1875
1876- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1877 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1878 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1879 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1880 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1881 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1882 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1883 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001884
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001885- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1886 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1887 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001888
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001889- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1890 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1891 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1892 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1893 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001894
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001895- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1896 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1897 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001899- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1900 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001901
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001902- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1903 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1904 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1905 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1906 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001907
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001908- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1909 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1910 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1911
1912- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1913 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1914 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001916- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1917 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1918 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1919 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001920 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001922- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1923 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001924
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001925- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1926 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001927
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001928- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001929 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001930 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1931 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001932
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001933
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001934What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001935===============================
1936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001937*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1938
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001939Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001940--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001941
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001942- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1943 with a custom metaclass.
1944
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001945Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001946-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001947
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001948- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1949 are proxies.
1950
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001951Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001952-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001953
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001954- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1955 very short strings.
1956
1957- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1958 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1959 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1960 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1961 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1962
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001963Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001964-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001965
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001966- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1967 close or delete time).
1968
1969- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1970 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1971
1972- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1973
1974- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001975 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001976
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001977Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001978-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001979
1980Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001981-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001982
1983C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001984-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001985
1986New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001987-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001988
1989Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001990-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001991
1992Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001993-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001994
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001995- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1996
1997- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1998 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1999
2000- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2001 deleted at process exit time.
2002
2003- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2004 in backslash.
2005
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002006Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002007----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002008
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002009- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2010 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2011 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2012
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002013
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002014What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002015===========================
2016
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002017*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2018
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002019Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002020--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002021
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002022- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2023 been extensively updated. See
2024
2025 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2026
2027 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2028
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002029- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2030 deleted!
2031
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002032- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2033 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2034 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2035 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2036 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2037
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002038- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2039
2040 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2041 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2042
2043 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2044 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2045 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2046 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2047 supported anyway.
2048
2049 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2050 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2051
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002052- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2053 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2054 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2055 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2056 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002057
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002058- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2059 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2060 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2061
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002062Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002063-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002064
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002065- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2066 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2067 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2068 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2069 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2070 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002071 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2072 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2073 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2074 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002075
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002076- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2077 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2078 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2079
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002080Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002081-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002082
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002083- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2084
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002085Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002086-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002087
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002088- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2089 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2090 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2091 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2092 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2093 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2094
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002095- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2096
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002097- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2098
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002099- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2100
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002101- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2102 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2103 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2104
2105- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2106
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002107Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002108-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002109
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002110- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2111 off a search on Google.
2112
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002113Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002114-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002115
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002116- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2117 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2118 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2119 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2120 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2121 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2122 other platforms should do likewise.
2123
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002124- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2125 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2126 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2127
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002128C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002129-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002130
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002131- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2132 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2133 producing key-value pairs.
2134
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002135- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002136 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002137 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2138 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2139 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2140 previously went unchallenged.
2141
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002142New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002143-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002144
2145Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002146-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002147
2148Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002149-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002150
2151Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002152----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002153
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002154- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2155 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002156
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002157- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2158 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2159 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2160 home.
2161
2162
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002163What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002164===========================
2165
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002166*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2167
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002168Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002169--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002170
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002171- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2172 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002173
2174 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002175 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002176
2177 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2178 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002179 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002180 This needs to be documented.
2181
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002182- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2183 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2184
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002185- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2186 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2187 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2188
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002189- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2190 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2191
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002192- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2193 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2194 class forbids it).
2195
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002196- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2197 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2198 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2199
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002200- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2201
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002202Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002203-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002204
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002205- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2206 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002207 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002208
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002209- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2210 (like 1 + '').
2211
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002212Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002213-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002214
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002215- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2216 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2217 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2218 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002219 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002220 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2221
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002222- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2223 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2224 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2225 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2226
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002227- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2228 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002229 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2230 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2231 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002232
2233- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2234 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002235
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002236- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2237 bytes on its input.
2238
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002239Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002240-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002241
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002242- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002243 convenience function.
2244
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002245- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2246 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2247 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002248 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2249 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2250 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2251 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2252 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2253 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002254
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002255- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2256 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2257 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2258 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2259
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002260- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2261 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2262 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2263
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002264- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2265 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2266 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2267 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2268
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002269- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2270 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002271 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002272 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2273 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2274 new -l and -e options.
2275
2276- statcache is now deprecated.
2277
2278- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2279 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002280 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002281 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2282 time properly taken into account.
2283
2284- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2285 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2286 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2287 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2288
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002289Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002290-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002291
2292Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002293-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002294
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002295- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2296 is built with libdb3 if available.
2297
2298- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2299
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002300C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002301-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002302
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002303- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2304 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2305 PySequence_Size().
2306
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002307- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2308
2309- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2310 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2311 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2312
2313- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2314 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2315
2316- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2317 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2318
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002319New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002320-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002321
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002322- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2323 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2324
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002325- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2326 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2327
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002328- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2329
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002330Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002331-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002332
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002333- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2334 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002336Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002337-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002338
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002339Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002340----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002341
2342- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2343 removed completely in the next release.
2344
2345- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2346 OSX.
2347
2348- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2349 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2350
2351- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2352
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002353
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002354What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002355===========================
2356
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002357*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2358
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002359Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002360--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002361
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002362- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002363 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002364 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002365 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2366 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002367 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2368 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002369 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2370 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002371
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002372- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2373 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2374
2375- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2376 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2377
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002378Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002379-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002380
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002381- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2382 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2383 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2384 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2385 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2386 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2387 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2388 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2389
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002390- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2391 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2392 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2393 example).
2394
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002395- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002396 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002397 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002398 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002399
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002400- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2401 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2402 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002403 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002404
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002405- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2406 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2407 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2408 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2409 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2410 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2411
2412 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2413
2414 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2415
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002416Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002417-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002418
2419- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2420
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002421- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2422
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002423- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2424 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002425
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002426- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2427 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2428 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2429 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2430 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2431 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002432 attributes.
2433
2434- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2435 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2436 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002437
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002438- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2439 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2440 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002441
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002442- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2443 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2444 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002445 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2446 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2447
2448- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2449 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002450
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002451Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002452-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002453
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002454- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2455 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2456
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002457- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2458 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2459 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2460 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2461
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002462- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2463 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2464 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2465 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2466
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002467 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2468 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2469 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2470 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2471 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2472 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2473 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2474 without losing information).
2475
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002476- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002477 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2478 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2479 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2480 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2481 module).
2482
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002483 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002484 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2485 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2486 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2487 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002488
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002489- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002490 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2491 encoding.
2492
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002493- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2494 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2495
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002496- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002497 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2498
2499- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2500 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2501 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2502 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2503
2504- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2505
2506- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2507 ON, and OFF.
2508
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002509- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2510 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2511
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002512Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002513-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002514
2515- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2516 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2517 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002518
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002519- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2520 been added: -X and -E.
2521
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002522Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002523-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002524
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002525- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2526 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2527
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002528C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002529-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002530
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002531- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2532 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2533 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2534 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2535 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2536
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002537- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2538 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2539 as long) arguments.
2540
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002541- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2542 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2543 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2544 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2545 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2546 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2547
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002548- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2549 input.
2550
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002551New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002552-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002553
2554Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002555-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002556
2557Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002558-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002559
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002560- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2561 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2562 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2563
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002564- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2565 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2566 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002567 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002568
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002569 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2570 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2571 import signal
2572 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002573
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002574 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002575 while 1:
2576 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002577 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002578 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2579 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2580 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2581 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002582
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002583
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002584What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2585===========================
2586
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002587*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2588
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002589Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002590--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002591
2592- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2593 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2594 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2595
2596- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2597 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2598 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2599 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2600 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2601 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2602 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002603
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002604- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002605 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002606 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2607 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2608 associate a docstring with a property.
2609
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002610- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2611 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2612 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2613 other built-in object types.
2614
2615- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2616 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2617 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2618 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2619 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2620
2621- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2622 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2623
2624- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2625 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002626 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002627 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2628 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2629 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2630 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2631 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2632
2633- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2634 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2635 class.
2636
2637- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2638 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2639 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2640 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2641
2642- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2643 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2644 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2645 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2646
2647- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2648 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2649
2650- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2651 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2652 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2653 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2654 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002655 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002656 with the same value as s.
2657
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002658- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2659
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002660Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002661----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002662
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002663- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2664
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002665- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2666 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2667 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2668 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2669 objects.
2670
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002671- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2672 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002673 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2674 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2675
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002676- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2677 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2678 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2679
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002680Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002681-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002682
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002683- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2684 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2685 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2686 by the instances.
2687
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002688- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2689 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2690 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2691
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002692- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2693 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2694 before the entire comparison is complete.
2695
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002696- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2697 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2698 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2699
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002700- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2701 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2702 getwriter().
2703
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002704- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2705 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2706
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002707- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002708 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2709 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2710
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002711- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2712 iterable object.
2713
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002714- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2715 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002716
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002717- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2718 authentication.
2719
2720- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2721 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002722
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002723- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002724 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2725 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2726 a sample driver.)
2727
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002728Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002729-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002730
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002731- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2732 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2733 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2734 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2735 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2736 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2737 kernel has large file support.
2738
2739- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2740 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2741 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2742 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2743 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2744
2745- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2746 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2747 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2748
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002749C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002750-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002751
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002752- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2753 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2754
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002755New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002756-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002757
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002758- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2759 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2760
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002761Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002762-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002763
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002764- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2765 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2766 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2767 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2768 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2769
2770- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2771 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2772 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2773 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2774
2775- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2776 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2777
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002778Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002779-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002780
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002781- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002782 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2783 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002784
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002785
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002786What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2787===========================
2788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002789*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2790
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002791Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002792----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002793
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002794- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2795 big to represent as a C double.
2796
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002797- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2798 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2799 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2800 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2801 restriction).
2802
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002803- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2804 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2805 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2806 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2807 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2808
2809 >>> dir([])
2810 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2811 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2812 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2813 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2814 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2815 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2816 'reverse', 'sort']
2817
2818 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2819
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002820- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002821 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2822 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2823 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2824 OverflowError exception.
2825
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002826- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002827 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002828 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2829 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2830 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2831 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2832 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002833 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002834 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2835 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2836
2837 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2838 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2839 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2840 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002841
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002842- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002843 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2844 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2845 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2846 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2847 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2848 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2849 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2850 once it is created.
2851
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002852- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2853 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2854 (key, value) pairs.
2855
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002856- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002857 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2858 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2859
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002860- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2861 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2862 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2863 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2864 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002865
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002866- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002867 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2868 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2869
2870 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2871
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002872- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002873 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2874
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002875Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002876-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002877
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002878- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002879 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2880 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002881
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002882- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2883 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2884 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2885 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2886 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2887 in this area anymore).
2888
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002889- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2890 threading.Timer.
2891
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002892- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2893 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2894
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002895- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002896 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2897
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002898- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002899 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2900 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2901 converted to Python longs.
2902
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002903- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002904 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2905
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002906- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2907 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2908 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2909
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002910Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002911-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002912
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002913- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2914 division operators as per PEP 238.
2915
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002916Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002917-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002918
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002919- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2920 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2921 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2922 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2923
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002924C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002925-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002926
2927- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002928
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002929- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2930 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002931 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002932
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002933 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2934 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002935 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002937
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002938- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002939 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2940 module:
2941
2942 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002943
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002944 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2945 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002946
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002947 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2948 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002949
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002950 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2951
2952 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2953
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002954- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002955 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2956 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2957 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002958
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002959New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002960-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002961
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002962- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2963 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2964 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2965 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2966 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002967
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002968Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002970
2971Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002973
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002974- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2975 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2976 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2977 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002978 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2979 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2980 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2981 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2982 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002983
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002984- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002985 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2986
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002987
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002988What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2989===========================
2990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002991*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2992
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002993Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002994-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002995
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002996- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2997 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2998
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002999- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3000 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3001 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003002
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003003- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3004 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3005 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3006 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003007
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003008- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3009
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003011
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003012Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003014
3015- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003016 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003017 the module docstring for details.
3018
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003019Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003021
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003022- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003023 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3024 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3025 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003026
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003027- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3028 Nick Mathewson.
3029
3030Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003031----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003032
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003033- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3034 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3035 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3036 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3037 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3038 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3039 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3040 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3041
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003042- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3043 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3044 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3045 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3046
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003047- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3048 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3049 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3050 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3051 come a long way).
3052
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003053- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3054 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3055 write filters for these warnings).
3056
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003057- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3058 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3059 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3060 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3061 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3062
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003063- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3064 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3065 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3066 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3067 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3068 older distribution.
3069
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003070Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003072
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003073- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3074 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003075 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003076
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003077- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3078 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3079 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3080
3081- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3082
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003083- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3084
3085- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3086
3087- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3088
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003090
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003091- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3092
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003093New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003095
3096C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003097-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003098
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003099- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3100 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3101 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3102 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3103 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3104 against buffer overruns.
3105
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003106- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003107 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3108 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003109 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3110 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3111 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3112
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003113- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3114 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3115 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3116 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3117 deprecated.
3118
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003119Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003120-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003121
3122- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3123 relevant is found.
3124
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003125
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003126What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003127===========================
3128
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003129*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3130
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003131Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003132----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003133
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003134- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3135 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3136 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3137 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3138 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3139 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3140 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3141 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003142 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003143 repaired.
3144
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003145- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003146 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003147 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3148 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3149 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3150 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3151 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3152 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3153 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3154 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3155
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003156- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3157 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3158 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3159 leading BMO character).
3160
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003161- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3162 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3163 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3164
3165 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3166 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3167 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003168
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003169 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3170 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3171 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3172 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3173 for various simple to use conversions.
3174
3175 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3176 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3177
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003178 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3179 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3180 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3181 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3182 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3183 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3184 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3185 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3186 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3187 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3188 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3189 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3190 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3191 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3192 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003193
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003194- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3195 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3196 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003197 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003198 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003199
3200 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003201 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3202 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3203 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3204 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3205 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003206 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3207 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003208
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003209 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3210 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3211 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003212 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003213
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003214- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3215 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3216 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3217 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3218 floating arithmetic,
3219
3220 x = 9007199254740992.0
3221 print long(x)
3222
3223 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3224 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3225 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3226 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3227 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3228 functions are of good quality).
3229
3230 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3231 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3232 algorithms to break.
3233
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003234- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3235 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3236 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3237 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3238 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3239 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3240 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3241 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3242 order.
3243
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003244- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3245 operation along the most common code paths.
3246
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003247- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3248 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3249
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003250- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3251 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3252 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3253 {}.update(UserDict())
3254
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003255- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3256 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3257 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3258 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3259 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3260 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3261 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3262 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3263
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003264- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003265 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003266
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003267 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003268 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3269 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003270 join() method of strings
3271 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003272 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3273 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003274 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003275 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003276
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003277- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3278 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3279
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003280- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3281 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3282
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003283- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3284 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3285 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3286 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3287
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003288- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3289 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003290 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003291 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3292 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003293
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003294- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3295
3296
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003297Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003299
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003300- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003301 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003302 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3303 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3304
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003305- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3306 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3307
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003308- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3309 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3310 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3311 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3312
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003313- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3314 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3315 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3316
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003317- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3318
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003319- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3320
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003321- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3322 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3323 that are still imported into string.py).
3324
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003325- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3326
3327- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3328 Now it does.
3329
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003330- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3331
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003332- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3333 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3334 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3335 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3336 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003337 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3338 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003339
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003340- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3341 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3342 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3343 'help(object)'.
3344
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003345Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003347
3348- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003349 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003350 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3351 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3352
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003353- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003354 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3355 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003356
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003357C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003358-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003359
3360- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3361 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362
3363----
3364
3365**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**