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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
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000015- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
16 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
17 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
18
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000019- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
20 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
21 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
22 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
23
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000024- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
25 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
26 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
27 length is not known).
28
29- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
30 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000031 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
32 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000033 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
34
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000035- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
36 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
37 keyword arguments.
38
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000039- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
40 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
41 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
42
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000043- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
44 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
45 cases.
46
47- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
48 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
49 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
50 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
51 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
52 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
53 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
54 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
55 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
56 a release build.
57
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000058- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
59 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
60
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000061- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000062 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000063
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000064- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
65 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
66 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
67 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
68 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
69 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
70 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
71 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
72 destroyed.
73
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000074- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
75 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
76 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
77 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
78 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
79 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
80 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
81 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
82
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000083- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
84 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
85 character other than a space.
86
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000087- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
88 by the function object or by the method object, the function
89 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
90 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
91 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
92 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
93 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
94 attributes with the same name.
95
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000096- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
97 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
98 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
99 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
100 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
101 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
102 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
103 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
104 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
105 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
106 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
107 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
108 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
109 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000110
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000111- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
112 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
113 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
114 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
115 This has been repaired.
116
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000117- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
118
119- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
120
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000121- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
122 over a sequence.
123
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000124- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
125 from any iterable.
126
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000127- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
128
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000129- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
130 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
131 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
132 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
133 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
134 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
135 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
136 records with equal keys is unchanged).
137
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000138- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
139 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
140 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
141
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000142- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
143 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
144 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
145 freelist.
146
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000147- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
148 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
149
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000150- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
151 number.
152
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000153- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
154 a TypeError exception.
155
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000156- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
157 820195.
158
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000159- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
160 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
161 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
162
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000163- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
164 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
165 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000166
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000167- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
168 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
169 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
170
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000171Extension modules
172-----------------
173
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000174- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
175 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
176 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
177 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
178 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
179 #897625.
180
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000181- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
182 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
183
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000184- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
185 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
186 and pops on either side of the deque.
187
188- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
189 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
190
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000191- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
192 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
193 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
194 other functions that expect a function argument.
195
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000196- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
197
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000198- os.getsid was added.
199
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000200- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
201 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
202 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
203
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000204- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
205
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000206- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
207
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000208- readline.clear_history was added.
209
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000210- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
211
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000212- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
213
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000214- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
215
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000216- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
217
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000218- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
219
220- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
221
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000222- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
223
224- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
225
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000226- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
227 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
228 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
229
230- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
231 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
232 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
233 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
234 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
235 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
236 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
237
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000238- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
239 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
240 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
241 the Unix uniq filter.
242
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000243- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
244 iterators from a single iterable.
245
246- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
247 of raising a TypeError exception.
248
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000249- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
250 as parameter.
251
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000252Library
253-------
254
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000255- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
256
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000257- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
258 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
259 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
260 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
261 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
262 accordingly.
263
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000264- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
265 decoding standards.
266
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000267- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
268 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
269 called for all requests.
270
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000271- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
272 they are passed to the compiler.
273
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000274- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
275 indent, width and depth.
276
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000277- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
278 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
279
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000280- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
281 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
282
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000283- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
284
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000285- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
286
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000287- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
288
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000289- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
290 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
291
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000292- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
293 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000294
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000295- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
296 a string).
297
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000298- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
299
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000300- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
301
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000302- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
303
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000304- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
305
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000306- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
307 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
308 list of fieldnames.
309
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000310- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
311 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
312
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000313- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
314
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000315- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
316 empty lists.
317
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000318- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
319 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
320 and shelves.
321
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000322- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
323 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
324
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000325- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000326 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
327 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000328
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000329- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
330 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000331 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000332
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000333- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000334 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
335 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
336
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000337- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
338 and removed in Py2.4.
339
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000340- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
341
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000342- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
343
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000344Tools/Demos
345-----------
346
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000347- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
348 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
349
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000350- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
351
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000352- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
353 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
354 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
355 destination in situations where both files are given.
356
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000357- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
358 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
359 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
360 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
361
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000362- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
363
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000364- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
365 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
366 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
367 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
368 now.
369
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000370- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
371 in effect
372
373- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
374 C-c C-h
375
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000376- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
377 -d option was given.
378
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000379Build
380-----
381
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000382- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
383 removed.
384
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000385- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
386 supported (see PEP 11).
387
388- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
389
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000390- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
391
392- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
393 (see PEP 11).
394
395- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
396 sizeof(char) must be 1.
397
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000398C API
399-----
400
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000401- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
402 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
403 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
404 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
405 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
406
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000407- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
408 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
409 about 10% faster.
410
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000411- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
412 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
413
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000414- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
415 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
416 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
417 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
418
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000419New platforms
420-------------
421
422Tests
423-----
424
425Windows
426-------
427
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000428- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
429 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
430 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
431 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
432
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000433- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
434 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
435 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
436
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000437Mac
438----
439
440
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000441What's New in Python 2.3 final?
442===============================
443
444*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
445
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000446IDLE
447----
448
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000449- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
450 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
451 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
452 context-menu actions.
453
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000454- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
455 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
456 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
457 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
458 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
459 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
460 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
461 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
462 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
463
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000464
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000465What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
466=============================================
467
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000468*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000469
470Core and builtins
471-----------------
472
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000473- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000474 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000475 comment at the end are still unsupported.
476
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000477Extension modules
478-----------------
479
480- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
481 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
482 than once. This has been fixed.
483
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000484- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
485 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
486 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
487 call.
488
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000489- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
490
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000491Library
492-------
493
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000494- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
495 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
496
497- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
498 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
499 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
500 restored.
501
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000502IDLE
503----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000504
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000505- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000506
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000507Build
508-----
509
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000510- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
511 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
512
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000513C API
514-----
515
516Windows
517-------
518
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000519- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
520 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
521
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000522- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
523
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000524Mac
525---
526
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000527- Various fixes to pimp.
528
529- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
530
531- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
532 more problems than it solves.
533
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000534
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000535What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
536=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000537
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000538*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
539
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000540Core and builtins
541-----------------
542
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000543- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
544 by sys.setcheckinterval().
545
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000546- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
547 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000548 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000549
550- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
551 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
552 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000553 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000554
555- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
556 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000557
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000558- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
559 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
560 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
561
562- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000563 770247.
564
565- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000566
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000567Extension modules
568-----------------
569
570- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
571 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
572
573- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
574
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000575- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
576
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000577- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
578 contained within the _strptime module.
579
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000580- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
581 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
582
583- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000584 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
585
586- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
587 the find_class attribute, if present.
588
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000589- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000590
591 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
592 (SF bug 763298).
593
594 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000595 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
596 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
597 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000598
599 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
600
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000601Library
602-------
603
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000604- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
605
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000606- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
607 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
608 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
609 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
610 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
611 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
612 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
613 or Tester().
614
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000615- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
616 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
617 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
618 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
619 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
620 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
621 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
622 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
623 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000624
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000625 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000626
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000627- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
628 weren't before was an oversight.
629
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000630- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
631 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
632
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000633- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
634 when there are no lines.
635
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000636- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
637 which could occur with Tk 8.4
638
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000639- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
640 to child processes.
641
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000642- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
643
644- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
645
646- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
647 xmlrpclib.
648
649- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
650 responses.
651
652- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
653 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
654
655- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
656 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
657 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
658
659- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
660 used as patterns.
661
662- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
663 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
664 than Tk 8.3.
665
666- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
667
668- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000669
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000670Tools/Demos
671-----------
672
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000673- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
674
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000675- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
676
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000677- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000678
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000679Build
680-----
681
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000682- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
683
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000684- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
685
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000686- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
687 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000688
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000689- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
690 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
691 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000692
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000693C API
694-----
695
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000696- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
697 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
698
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000699Windows
700-------
701
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000702- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
703 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
704 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
705 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
706 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
707 Python exception ::
708
709 thread.error: can't start new thread
710
711 is raised now.
712
713- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
714 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
715 instead of from DLL teardown.
716
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000717Mac
718---
719
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000720- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000721 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000722 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
723 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
724 the executable in the bundle.
725
726- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000727
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000728- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
729
730- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
731 on Panther.
732
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000733What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
734================================
735
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000736*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000737
738Core and builtins
739-----------------
740
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000741- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
742 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
743 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
744 with the -i option.
745
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000746- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
747 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
748
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000749- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
750 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
751
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000752- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
753 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
754 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
755 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
756 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
757 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
758 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
759 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
760 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
761 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
762 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
763 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
764 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000765
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000766- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
767 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
768 embedded in a lambda expression.
769
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000770- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
771 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
772 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
773 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
774 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
775
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000776- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
777 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
778 matches the restriction on classic classes.
779
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000780- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
781 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
782
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000783- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
784 It's writable again.
785
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000786- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
787 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
788 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000789 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000790
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000791- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
792 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
793 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
794
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000795Extension modules
796-----------------
797
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000798- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
799 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
800
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000801- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
802 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
803 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
804 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
805
806- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
807 collection.
808
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000809- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
810 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
811 unique within a single program run.
812
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000813- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
814 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
815
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000816- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
817 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
818
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000819- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
820 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000821
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000822- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
823
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000824- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
825 Fixes SF bug #730685.
826
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000827- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
828 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
829 for many BSD-derived systems.
830
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000831
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000832Library
833-------
834
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000835- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
836 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
837 primary ones:
838
839 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
840 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
841 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
842
843 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
844 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
845 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
846 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
847 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
848 framework features (which doctest lacks).
849
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000850- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
851 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
852 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
853 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
854 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
855 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
856 argument.
857
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000858- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
859 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
860 in the archive.
861
862- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
863 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
864
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000865- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
866 569574).
867
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000868- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
869 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
870 no more.
871
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000872- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
873 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
874 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
875 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
876 code coverage.
877
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000878- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
879 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
880 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000881 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
882 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000883
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000884- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
885 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
886 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000887 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000888
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000889- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
890
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000891- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
892 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
893 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
894 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
895
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000896- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
897 handling.
898
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000899- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
900 __doc__ of data descriptors.
901
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000902- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
903 in socket.py.
904
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000905- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
906
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000907- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
908 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
909 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
910 opener with proxy support.
911
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000912- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
913
914- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
915
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000916Tools/Demos
917-----------
918
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000919- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
920
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000921- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
922
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000923- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
924 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000925
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000926- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
927 files.
928
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000929Build
930-----
931
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000932- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000933 different root directory.
934
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000935C API
936-----
937
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000938- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
939 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
940 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
941 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
942 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
943 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
944 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
945 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
946 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
947 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
948
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000949- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
950 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
951 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
952 from Python.
953
954
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000955New platforms
956-------------
957
958None this time.
959
960Tests
961-----
962
963- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
964 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
965
966Windows
967-------
968
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000969- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
970
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000971- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
972 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
973 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
974 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
975 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
976 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
977 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
978 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
979 that's what it's for.
980
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000981Mac
982---
983
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000984- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
985 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
986 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
987 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000988- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
989 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
990- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000991
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000992SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
993------------------------------------
994
995430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
996598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
997622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
998661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
999683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1000697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1001713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1002724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1003727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1004729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1005730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1006731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1007732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1008733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1009735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1010740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1011744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1012745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1013747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1014749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1015751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1016753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1017755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1018757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1019760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1020
1021
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001022What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1023================================
1024
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001025*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001026
1027Core and builtins
1028-----------------
1029
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001030- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1031 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1032
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001033- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1034 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1035 and cannot be strings).
1036
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001037- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1038 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1039 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1040 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1041
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001042- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1043 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1044 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1045 Python itself.
1046
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001047- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1048 the referenced object, if it has one.
1049
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001050- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1051 the thread started at
1052 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1053
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001054- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1055 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1056 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1057 placed on a list index.
1058
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001059- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1060 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1061 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1062 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1063
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001064- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1065 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1066 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1067 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1068 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1069 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1070 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1071
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001072- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1073 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1074 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1075 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1076 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1077
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001078- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1079 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001080
1081- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1082 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1083 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1084 #693195.)
1085
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001086- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1087 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001088
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001089- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001090 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001091 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1092 interpreter executions, would fail.
1093
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001094- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001095 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001096 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001097
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001098Extension modules
1099-----------------
1100
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001101- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1102 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1103 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1104 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1105
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001106- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1107 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1108
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001109- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1110 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1111 and Greg Chapman.)
1112
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001113- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1114 recursively.
1115
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001116- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001117 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1118 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1119 leaks.
1120
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001121- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1122
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001123- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1124 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1125 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1126 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1127 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1128 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1129 #705836.
1130
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001131- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001132 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1133
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001134- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1135 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1136 See SF bug #692416.
1137
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001138- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1139 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1140
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001141- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1142 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1143 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001144
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001145- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001146 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1147 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1148
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001149- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1150 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1151 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1152 timeouts to work properly.
1153
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001154Library
1155-------
1156
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001157- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1158 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1159 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1160 future release.
1161
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001162- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1163 for querying platform dependent features.
1164
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001165- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001166
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001167- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1168 pickle protocol versions.
1169
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001170- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1171 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1172 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1173
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001174- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1175
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001176- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1177 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1178 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1179 modules.
1180
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001181- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1182 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1183 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1184
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001185- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1186 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1187
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001188- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1189 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1190 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1191
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001192- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001193 MS Office extensions.
1194
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001195- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1196 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1197
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001198- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1199 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1200
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001201- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1202 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1203 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1204 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1205 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1206 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1207
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001208- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1209 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1210 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001211
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001212- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1213 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1214 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1215
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001216- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1217
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001218- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1219 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1220 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1221
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001222Tools/Demos
1223-----------
1224
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001225- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1226 See the module docstring for details.
1227
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001228Build
1229-----
1230
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001231- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1232 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001233
1234C API
1235-----
1236
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001237- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1238
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001239- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1240 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1241 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1242
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001243- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1244 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001245
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001246 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1247 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1248 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001249
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001250- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001251 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1252
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001253- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1254 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1255 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001256
1257New platforms
1258-------------
1259
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001260None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001261
1262Tests
1263-----
1264
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001265- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1266 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001267
1268Windows
1269-------
1270
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001271- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1272 function.
1273
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001274- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1275 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001276
1277Mac
1278---
1279
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001280- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1281 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001282
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001283- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1284 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001285
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001286- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1287 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1288 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001289
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001290- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001291 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1292 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001293
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001294- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1295 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001296
1297
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001298What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1299=================================
1300
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001301*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001302
1303Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001304-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001305
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001306- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1307 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1308 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1309
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001310- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1311 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1312 (SF patch #664376.)
1313
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001314- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1315 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1316 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1317 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1318 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1319 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001320 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001321
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001322- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1323 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1324 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1325 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001326 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001327
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001328- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1329 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1330 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1331 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1332 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1333 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1334 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1335 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1336 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1337 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1338 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1339
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001340- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1341 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1342 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1343 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1344 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1345 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1346
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001347- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1348 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1349
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001350- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1351 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1352 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1353 case.)
1354
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001355- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1356 passed as unicode strings.
1357
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001358- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1359 See SF bug #683467.
1360
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001361- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1362 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1363
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001364- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1365
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001366- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1367
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001368- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1369 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1370 arguments.
1371
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001372- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1373 See SF bug #667147.
1374
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001375- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001376 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001377 See SF bug #676155.
1378
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001379- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001380 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001381 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1382 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1383 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1384 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1385 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1386 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001387
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001388Extension modules
1389-----------------
1390
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001391- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1392 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1393 tp_as_number pointer.
1394
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001395- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1396 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1397 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1398 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1399 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1400
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001401- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1402
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001403- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1404
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001405- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001406 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001407 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1408 patch #678531.)
1409
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001410- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1411 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1412
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001413- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1414 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1415
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001416- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1417
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001418- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1419 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1420 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1421
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001422- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1423
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001424- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1425 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1426
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001427- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001428
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001429- datetime changes:
1430
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001431 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1432
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001433 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1434 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1435 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1436 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1437 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1438 now.
1439
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001440 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001441 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1442 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001443
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001444 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001445 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001446 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1447 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1448 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1449 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001450
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001451 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1452 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1453 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001454 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1455
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001456 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1457 by a later example coded by Guido.
1458
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001459 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001460 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1461 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1462 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001463 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1464 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1465
1466 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1467 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1468 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1469 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1470 tzinfo subclass instance.
1471
1472 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1473 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1474 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1475 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1476 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1477 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1478 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1479 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001480
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001481 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1482 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1483 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1484 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1485 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001486 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1487
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001488 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001489
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001490 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1491 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1492 as a naive datetime object.
1493
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001494 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1495 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1496 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1497
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001498 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1499 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1500 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1501 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1502 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1503 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1504 comparison.
1505
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001506 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1507 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1508 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1509 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001510 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001511
1512 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001513
1514 and ::
1515
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001516 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1517
1518 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1519 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1520 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1521 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1522
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001523 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1524 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1525 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1526 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1527 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1528
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001529 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1530 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001531 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1532 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001533
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001534Library
1535-------
1536
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001537- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1538 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1539
1540- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1541 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1542 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1543 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1544 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1545 See PEP 307 for details.
1546
1547- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1548 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1549
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001550- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1551 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001552 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001553 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1554 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001555 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001556
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001557- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1558 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1559
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001560- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1561 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1562 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1563
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001564- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1565
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001566- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1567 exception.
1568
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001569- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1570 class.
1571
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001572- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1573 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1574 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1575
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001576- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1577 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1578
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001579- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001580 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1581 See SF bug #659228.
1582
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001583- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1584 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1585 See SF patch #651082.
1586
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001587- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001588
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001589- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1590 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1591
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001592- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001593 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001594
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001595- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1596 DOS paths from other platforms.
1597
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001598Tools/Demos
1599-----------
1600
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001601- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1602 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1603 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1604 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1605 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1606 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1607 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1608 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1609 example:
1610
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001611 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1612 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001613
1614 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1615
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001616
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001617Build
1618-----
1619
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001620- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1621 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1622 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001623 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1624
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001625 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1626
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001627- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1628 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1629 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1630 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1631 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1632 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1633 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1634 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1635 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1636
1637- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1638 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1639 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1640 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1641
1642- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1643 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1644
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001645C API
1646-----
1647
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001648- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1649 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001650
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001651- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1652 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1653 tp_as_number pointer.
1654
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001655- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1656 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1657 (SF #681367)
1658
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001659- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1660 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1661 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1662 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001663
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001664Tests
1665-----
1666
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001667- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001668 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1669 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1670 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1671 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1672 pydoc.)
1673
1674- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1675
1676- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001677
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001678Windows
1679-------
1680
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001681- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1682 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1683 time).
1684
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001685- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1686 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1687
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001688- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1689 release without strong cryptography.
1690
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001691- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001692 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001693
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001694- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1695 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1696
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001697Mac
1698---
1699
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001700- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1701 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001702
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001703- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1704 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1705 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001706
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001707- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1708 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001709
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001710- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1711 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1712 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1713 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001714
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001715- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001716 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1717 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1718 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001719
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001720
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001721What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001722=================================
1723
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001724*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001725
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001726Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001727--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001728
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001729- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1730
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001731- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1732 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001733 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001734 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001735 a different meaning than before.
1736
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001737- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001738 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001739 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001740
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001741- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001742 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001743 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001744
1745- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1746 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1747 and deallocation.
1748
1749- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1750 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1751
1752- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1753 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1754 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1755 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1756 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1757
1758- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1759 now detected by the garbage collector.
1760
1761- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1762 [SF bug 519621]
1763
1764- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1765 identifier.
1766
1767- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1768 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1769 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1770 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1771 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1772 [SF bug 563060]
1773
1774- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1775 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1776 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1777 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1778 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1779
1780- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1781 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1782 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1783
1784- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1785
1786- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1787 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1788 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1789 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1790 state of the slots would be lost.)
1791
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001792Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001793-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001794
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001795- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001796 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1797 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1798 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1799 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001800 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1801 Jython 2.1.
1802
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001803- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001804 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001805 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1806 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1807 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1808 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1809 these, see PEP 302.
1810
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001811- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1812 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1813 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1814
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001815- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1816 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1817 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1818
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001819- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1820 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1821 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1822
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001823- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1824 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1825 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1826 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1827 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1828 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1829 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1830 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1831 releases or implementations.
1832
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001833- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001834 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1835 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001836
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001837- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1838 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1839
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001840- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1841 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1842 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1843
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001844- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1845 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1846
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001847- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1848 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001849 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1850 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001851
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001852- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1853 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1854 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1855 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1856 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1857
1858 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1859 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1860 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1861 pattern.
1862
1863 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1864 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1865 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1866 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1867
1868 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1869 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1870 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1871 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1872 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1873 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1874
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001875- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1876 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1877 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1878 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1879 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1880 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1881 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1882 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001883
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001884- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1885 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1886 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1887 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1888 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001889 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1890 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1891 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1892 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1893 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1894 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1895 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001896
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001897- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1898 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1899
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001900- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1901 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1902 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1903 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1904 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1905 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1906 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1907 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1908 to Zack Weinberg!
1909
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001910- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1911 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1912 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1913 type. This has been fixed now.
1914
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001915- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1916 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1917 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1918
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001919- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1920 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1921 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1922 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1923 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1924 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1925 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1926 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001927 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001928
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001929- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1930 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1931 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001932
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001933- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1934 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1935 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1936 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1937 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1938 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1939 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1940 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001941 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001942 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1943 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1944
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001945- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1946 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1947 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1948 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1949 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1950 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1951 this.)
1952
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001953- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1954 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001955 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001956 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001957 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1958 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001959 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1960 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001961
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001962- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1963 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1964 currently running.
1965
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001966- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1967 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1968 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1969 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1970
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001971- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1972 as directory names.
1973
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001974- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1975 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1976
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001977- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1978 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1979
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001980- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001981 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1982 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001983
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001984- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1985 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1986 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1987 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1988 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1989
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001990- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1991 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1992 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1993 removed.
1994
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001995- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1996 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1997 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1998
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001999- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2000 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2001 to __debug__.
2002
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002003- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2004 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2005 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2006
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002007- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2008 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2009 deprecated now.
2010
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002011- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2012 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2013 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002014
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002015- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2016 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2017 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2018 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2019 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002020
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002021- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2022 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2023
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002024- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2025 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2026 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002027 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002028 is backward compatible.
2029
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002030- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2031 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2032 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2033 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2034 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2035
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002036- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2037 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2038 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2039 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2040 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2041 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002042
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002043- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2044 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2045
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002046- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2047 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2048
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002049- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2050 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2051 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2052 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2053 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2054
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002055- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2056 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2057 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2058
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002059- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002060 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2061
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002062- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2063 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2064 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002065
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002066- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2067 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2068
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002069- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2070 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2071 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2072
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002073- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2074
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002075Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002077
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002078- Added three operators to the operator module:
2079 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2080 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2081 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2082
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002083- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2084
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002085- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2086 archives.
2087
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002088- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2089 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2090 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2091
2092 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2093
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002094- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2095 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2096 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002097 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002098
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002099- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2100 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2101 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2102 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002103 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2104 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2105 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2106 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002107
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002108- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2109 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002110
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002111- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2112
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002113- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2114 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2115
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002116- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2117 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2118 supported.
2119
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002120- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2121
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002122- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2123 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002124
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002125- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2126 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2127
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002128- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2129
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002130- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2131 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2132
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002133- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2134 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2135 functions but callable type objects.
2136
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002137- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002138 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002139 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002140
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002141- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2142 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002143
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002144- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2145 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002146
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002147- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2148 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2149 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2150 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2151
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002152- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2153 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002154
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002155- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2156 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2157 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2158 and __imul__.
2159
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002160- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002161 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2162 is called.
2163
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002164- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2165 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2166 interpreter was compiled.
2167
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002168- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2169 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2170 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002171 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002172 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2173 1, not 2.
2174
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002175- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2176 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2177 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2178 limit.
2179
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002180- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2181 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2182 bug #623464.
2183
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002184- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2185 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2186 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2187 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2188
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002189Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002190-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002191
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002192- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2193
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002194- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2195 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2196 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2197 with Python 2.3a2.
2198
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002199- os.path exposes getctime.
2200
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002201- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002202 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002203 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002204 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002205 unit tests of floating point results.
2206
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002207- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2208 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2209 has been increased.
2210
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002211- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2212 executed.
2213
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002214- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2215 postinstallation script.
2216
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002217- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2218 test the current module.
2219
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002220- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002221 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2222 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2223 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2224 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2225
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002226- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002227 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002228 Ward's Optik package.
2229
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002230- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2231 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2232 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2233 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2234
2235- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2236 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002237 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002238
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002239- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2240 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2241 shelf are binary pickles.
2242
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002243- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2244 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2245
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002246- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2247 modules are iterators now.
2248
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002249- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2250 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2251 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2252 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2253 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2254 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002255
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002256- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2257 with their entity value.
2258
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002259- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2260
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002261- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2262 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002263
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002264- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2265 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002266 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002267
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002268- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2269 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2270 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2271 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2272 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2273 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2274 main():
2275
2276 import locale
2277 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2278
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002279- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2280 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2281
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002282- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2283 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2284 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2285 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2286 to the new standard.
2287
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002288- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2289 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2290 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2291 an extension to the database.
2292
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002293- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2294 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2295 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2296 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002297 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002298
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002299- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002300 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002301
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002302- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2303 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2304 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2305 bounded integers.
2306
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002307- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2308 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2309 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2310 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2311 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2312 in existence.
2313
2314 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2315 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2316 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2317 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2318 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2319 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2320
2321 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2322 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2323 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2324 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2325
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002326- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2327 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2328 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2329
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002330- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2331
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002332- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2333 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2334 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2335 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2336
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002337- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2338 argument.
2339
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002340- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2341 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2342 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2343 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2344 [SF patch 560794].
2345
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002346- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2347 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2348 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002349 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2350 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2351 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002352
2353- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2354 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002355
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002356- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2357 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2358 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2359 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002360
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002361- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2362 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2363 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2364 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2365 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2366
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002367- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002368
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002369- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2370
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002371- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2372 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2373 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2374 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2375 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2376 identical to None.
2377
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002378- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2379 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2380 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2381 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2382 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2383 results now.
2384
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002385- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2386 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2387
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002388- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2389 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2390 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2391 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2392 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2393 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2394 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2395 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2396
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002397- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2398
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002399- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2400 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2401
2402- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2403 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2404 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2405 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2406 and other systems.
2407
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002408- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2409 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2410 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2411 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 +00002412 work well with these.
2413
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002414- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2415
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002416- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002417 connections.
2418
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002419- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2420 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2421 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2422
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002423- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2424 sets
2425
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002426- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2427 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2428 name.
2429
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002430- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2431 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2432 passed in.
2433
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002434- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002435 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002436 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2437 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002438
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002439- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2440
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002441- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2442
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002443- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2444 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2445 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2446
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002447- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2448 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2449 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2450 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002451 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002452
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002453- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002454 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002455 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002456
2457- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2458 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2459 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2460
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002461- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002462 the value of its expression argument.
2463
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002464- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2465 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2466 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2467
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002468- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2469 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2470 skipstone browser was included.
2471
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002472- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2473 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2474
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002475Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002476-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002477
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002478- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2479 names in addition to accepting file names.
2480
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002481- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2482 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2483 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2484 still used and useful.)
2485
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002486- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2487 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2488 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2489 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002490
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002491- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2492 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2493 the generated binary.
2494
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002495Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002496-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002497
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002498- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2499
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002500- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2501 except in the hands of experts.
2502
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002503- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002504 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2505 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2506 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002507
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002508- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2509 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2510 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2511 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2512 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2513 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2514 builds.
2515
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002516- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2517 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2518 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2519 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2520 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2521 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2522 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2523 new type.
2524
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002525- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002526
2527 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2528 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2529 positive infinities.
2530
2531 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2532 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2533 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2534 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2535 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2536 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2537 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2538
2539 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2540
2541 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2542
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002543- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2544 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2545 size of the executable.
2546
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002547- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2548 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2549 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2550 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002551
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002552- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2553
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002554- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2555 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2556 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002557
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002558- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2559 well as Unix.
2560
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002561- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2562 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2563 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2564 modules in the README file for details.
2565
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002566C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002567-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002568
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002569- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2570 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002571 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002572 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002573 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002574
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002575- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2576 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2577 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2578 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2579 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2580 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002581 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002582 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2583 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2584 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2585 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2586 aligned.)
2587
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002588- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2589 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2590 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2591
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002592- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2593 level.
2594
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002595- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2596 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2597 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2598 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2599 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2600
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002601- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2602 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2603 code.
2604
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002605- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2606 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2607 adjusting for negative indices.
2608
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002609- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2610 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2611 object.
2612
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002613- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2614 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2615 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2616
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002617- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2618 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002619
2620- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2621
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002622- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2623 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2624 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2625 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2626
2627- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2628
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002629- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002630
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002631- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002632 without going through the buffer API.
2633
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002634- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002635
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002636- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2637 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2638 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2639 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2640
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002641- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2642 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2643
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002644- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002645 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2646
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002647New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002649
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002650- OpenVMS is now supported.
2651
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002652- AtheOS is now supported.
2653
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002654- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2655
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002656- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2657
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002658Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002659-----
2660
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002661- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2662 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2663 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002664
2665Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002666-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002667
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002668- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2669 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2670 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2671 bugs.
2672 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002673 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002674 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2675 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002676 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002677
2678- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002679 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002680
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002681- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2682 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2683
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002684- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2685 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002686 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002687 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2688
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002689- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2690 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2691 use files" uninstall option).
2692
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002693- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2694
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002695- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2696 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2697
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002698- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2699 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2700 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2701
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002702- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2703 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2704 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2705 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2706 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002707 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2708 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2709 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002710
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002711- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002712 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002713 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2714 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2715 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2716 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2717 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2718 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2719 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2720 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2721 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2722 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2723 work around.
2724
2725- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2726 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2727 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2728 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2729 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2730 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2731 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2732 specified with O_CREAT too).
2733
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002734Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002735----
2736
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002737- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002738
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002739- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2740 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2741 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2742
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002743- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2744 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2745 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2746
2747- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2748 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2749 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2750 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2751 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2752 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2753 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2754 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002755
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002756- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2757 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2758 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002759
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002760- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2761 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2762 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2763 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2764 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002765
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002766- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2767 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2768 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002769
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002770- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2771 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002772
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002773- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2774 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2775 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2776 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2777 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002778
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002779- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2780 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2781 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2782
2783- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2784 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2785 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002786
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002787- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2788 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2789 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2790 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002791 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002792
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002793- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2794 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002795
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002796- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2797 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002798
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002799- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002800 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002801 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2802 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002803
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002804
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002805What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002806===============================
2807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002808*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2809
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002810Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002812
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002813- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2814 with a custom metaclass.
2815
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002816Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002817-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002818
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002819- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2820 are proxies.
2821
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002822Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002823-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002824
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002825- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2826 very short strings.
2827
2828- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2829 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2830 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2831 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2832 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2833
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002834Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002835-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002836
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002837- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2838 close or delete time).
2839
2840- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2841 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2842
2843- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2844
2845- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002846 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002847
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002848Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002850
2851Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002852-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002853
2854C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002855-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002856
2857New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002858-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002859
2860Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002861-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002862
2863Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002864-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002865
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002866- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2867
2868- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2869 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2870
2871- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2872 deleted at process exit time.
2873
2874- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2875 in backslash.
2876
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002877Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002878----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002879
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002880- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2881 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2882 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2883
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002884
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002885What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002886===========================
2887
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002888*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2889
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002890Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002891--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002892
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002893- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2894 been extensively updated. See
2895
2896 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2897
2898 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2899
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002900- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2901 deleted!
2902
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002903- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2904 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2905 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2906 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2907 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2908
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002909- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2910
2911 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2912 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2913
2914 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2915 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2916 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2917 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2918 supported anyway.
2919
2920 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2921 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2922
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002923- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2924 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2925 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2926 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2927 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002928
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002929- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2930 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2931 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2932
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002933Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002934-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002935
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002936- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2937 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2938 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2939 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2940 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2941 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002942 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2943 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2944 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2945 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002946
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002947- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2948 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2949 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2950
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002951Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002952-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002953
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002954- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2955
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002956Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002957-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002958
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002959- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2960 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2961 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2962 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2963 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2964 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2965
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002966- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2967
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002968- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2969
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002970- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2971
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002972- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2973 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2974 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2975
2976- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2977
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002978Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002979-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002980
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002981- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2982 off a search on Google.
2983
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002984Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002985-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002986
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002987- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2988 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2989 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2990 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2991 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2992 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2993 other platforms should do likewise.
2994
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002995- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2996 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2997 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2998
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002999C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003001
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003002- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3003 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3004 producing key-value pairs.
3005
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003006- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003007 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003008 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3009 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3010 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3011 previously went unchallenged.
3012
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003013New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003015
3016Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003018
3019Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003021
3022Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003024
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003025- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3026 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003027
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003028- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3029 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3030 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3031 home.
3032
3033
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003034What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003035===========================
3036
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3038
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003039Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003040--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003041
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003042- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3043 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003044
3045 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003046 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003047
3048 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3049 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003050 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003051 This needs to be documented.
3052
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003053- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3054 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3055
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003056- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3057 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3058 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3059
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003060- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3061 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3062
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003063- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3064 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3065 class forbids it).
3066
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003067- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3068 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3069 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3070
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003071- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3072
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003073Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003074-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003075
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003076- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3077 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003078 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003079
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003080- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3081 (like 1 + '').
3082
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003083Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003084-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003085
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003086- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3087 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3088 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3089 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003090 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003091 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3092
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003093- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3094 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3095 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3096 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3097
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003098- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3099 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003100 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3101 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3102 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003103
3104- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3105 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003106
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003107- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3108 bytes on its input.
3109
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003110Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003112
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003113- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003114 convenience function.
3115
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003116- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3117 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3118 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003119 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3120 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3121 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3122 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3123 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3124 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003125
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003126- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3127 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3128 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3129 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3130
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003131- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3132 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3133 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3134
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003135- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3136 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3137 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3138 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3139
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003140- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3141 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003143 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3144 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3145 new -l and -e options.
3146
3147- statcache is now deprecated.
3148
3149- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3150 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003151 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003152 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3153 time properly taken into account.
3154
3155- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3156 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3157 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3158 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3159
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003160Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003161-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003162
3163Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003165
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003166- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3167 is built with libdb3 if available.
3168
3169- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3170
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003171C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003172-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003173
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003174- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3175 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3176 PySequence_Size().
3177
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003178- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3179
3180- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3181 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3182 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3183
3184- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3185 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3186
3187- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3188 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3189
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003190New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003192
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003193- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3194 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3195
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003196- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3197 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3198
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003199- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3200
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003201Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003203
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003204- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3205 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3206
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003207Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003208-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003209
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003210Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003211----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003212
3213- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3214 removed completely in the next release.
3215
3216- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3217 OSX.
3218
3219- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3220 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3221
3222- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3223
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003224
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003225What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003226===========================
3227
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3229
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003230Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003232
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003233- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003234 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003235 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003236 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3237 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003238 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3239 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003240 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3241 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003242
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003243- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3244 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3245
3246- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3247 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3248
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003249Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003250-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003251
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003252- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3253 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3254 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3255 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3256 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3257 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3258 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3259 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3260
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003261- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3262 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3263 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3264 example).
3265
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003266- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003267 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003268 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003269 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003270
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003271- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3272 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3273 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003274 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003275
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003276- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3277 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3278 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3279 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3280 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3281 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3282
3283 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3284
3285 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3286
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003287Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003289
3290- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3291
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003292- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3293
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003294- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3295 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003296
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003297- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3298 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3299 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3300 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3301 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3302 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003303 attributes.
3304
3305- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3306 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3307 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003308
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003309- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3310 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3311 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003312
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003313- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3314 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3315 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003316 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3317 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3318
3319- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3320 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003321
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003322Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003324
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003325- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3326 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3327
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003328- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3329 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3330 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3331 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3332
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003333- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3334 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3335 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3336 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3337
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003338 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3339 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3340 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3341 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3342 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3343 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3344 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3345 without losing information).
3346
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003347- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003348 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3349 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3350 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3351 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3352 module).
3353
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003354 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003355 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3356 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3357 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3358 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003359
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003360- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003361 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3362 encoding.
3363
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003364- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3365 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3366
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003368 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3369
3370- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3371 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3372 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3373 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3374
3375- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3376
3377- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3378 ON, and OFF.
3379
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003380- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3381 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3382
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003383Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003384-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003385
3386- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3387 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3388 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003389
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003390- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3391 been added: -X and -E.
3392
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003393Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003395
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003396- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3397 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3398
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003399C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003400-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003401
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003402- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3403 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3404 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3405 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3406 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3407
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003408- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3409 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3410 as long) arguments.
3411
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003412- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3413 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3414 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3415 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3416 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3417 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3418
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003419- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3420 input.
3421
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003422New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003423-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003424
3425Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003426-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003427
3428Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003430
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003431- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3432 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3433 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3434
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003435- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3436 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3437 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003438 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003439
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003440 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3441 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3442 import signal
3443 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003444
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003445 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003446 while 1:
3447 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003448 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003449 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3450 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3451 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3452 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003453
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003454
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003455What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3456===========================
3457
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003458*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3459
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003460Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003462
3463- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3464 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3465 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3466
3467- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3468 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3469 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3470 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3471 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3472 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3473 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003474
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003475- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003476 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003477 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3478 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3479 associate a docstring with a property.
3480
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003481- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3482 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3483 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3484 other built-in object types.
3485
3486- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3487 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3488 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3489 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3490 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3491
3492- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3493 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3494
3495- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3496 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003497 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003498 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3499 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3500 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3501 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3502 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3503
3504- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3505 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3506 class.
3507
3508- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3509 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3510 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3511 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3512
3513- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3514 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3515 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3516 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3517
3518- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3519 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3520
3521- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3522 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3523 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3524 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3525 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003526 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003527 with the same value as s.
3528
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003529- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3530
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003531Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003533
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003534- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3535
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003536- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3537 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3538 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3539 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3540 objects.
3541
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003542- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3543 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003544 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3545 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3546
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003547- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3548 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3549 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003551Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003553
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003554- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3555 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3556 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3557 by the instances.
3558
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003559- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3560 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3561 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3562
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003563- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3564 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3565 before the entire comparison is complete.
3566
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003567- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3568 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3569 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3570
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003571- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3572 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3573 getwriter().
3574
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003575- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3576 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3577
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003578- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003579 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3580 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3581
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003582- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3583 iterable object.
3584
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003585- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3586 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003587
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003588- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3589 authentication.
3590
3591- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3592 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003593
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003594- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003595 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3596 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3597 a sample driver.)
3598
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003599Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003601
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003602- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3603 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3604 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3605 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3606 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3607 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3608 kernel has large file support.
3609
3610- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3611 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3612 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3613 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3614 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3615
3616- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3617 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3618 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3619
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003620C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003621-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003622
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003623- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3624 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3625
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003626New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003628
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003629- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3630 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3631
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003632Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003634
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003635- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3636 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3637 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3638 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3639 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3640
3641- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3642 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3643 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3644 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3645
3646- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3647 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3648
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003649Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003651
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003652- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003653 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3654 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003655
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003656
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003657What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3658===========================
3659
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003660*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3661
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003662Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003663----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003664
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003665- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3666 big to represent as a C double.
3667
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003668- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3669 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3670 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3671 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3672 restriction).
3673
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003674- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3675 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3676 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3677 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3678 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3679
3680 >>> dir([])
3681 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3682 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3683 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3684 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3685 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3686 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3687 'reverse', 'sort']
3688
3689 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3690
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003691- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003692 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3693 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3694 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3695 OverflowError exception.
3696
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003697- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003698 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003699 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3700 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3701 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3702 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3703 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003704 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3706 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3707
3708 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3709 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3710 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3711 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003712
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003713- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003714 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3715 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3716 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3717 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3718 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3719 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3720 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3721 once it is created.
3722
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003723- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3724 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3725 (key, value) pairs.
3726
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003727- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003728 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3729 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3730
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003731- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3732 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3733 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3734 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3735 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003736
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003737- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003738 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3739 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3740
3741 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3742
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003743- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003744 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3745
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003746Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003748
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003749- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003750 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3751 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003752
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003753- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3754 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3755 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3756 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3757 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3758 in this area anymore).
3759
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003760- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3761 threading.Timer.
3762
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003763- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3764 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3765
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003766- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003767 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3768
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003769- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003770 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3771 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3772 converted to Python longs.
3773
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003774- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003775 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3776
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003777- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3778 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3779 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3780
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003781Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003783
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003784- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3785 division operators as per PEP 238.
3786
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003787Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003789
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003790- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3791 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3792 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3793 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3794
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003795C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003797
3798- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003799
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003800- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3801 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003802 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003803
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003804 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3805 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003806 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003807 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003808
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003809- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003810 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3811 module:
3812
3813 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003814
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003815 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3816 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003817
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003818 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3819 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003820
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003821 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3822
3823 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3824
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003825- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003826 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3827 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3828 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003829
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003830New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003832
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003833- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3834 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3835 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3836 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3837 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003838
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003839Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003841
3842Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003844
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003845- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3846 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3847 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3848 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003849 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3850 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3851 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3852 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3853 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003855- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003856 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3857
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003858
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003859What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3860===========================
3861
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3863
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003864Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003865-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003866
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003867- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3868 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3869
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003870- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3871 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3872 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003873
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003874- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3875 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3876 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3877 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003878
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003879- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3880
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003881- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003882
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003883Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003885
3886- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003887 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003888 the module docstring for details.
3889
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003890Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003891-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003892
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003893- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003894 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3895 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3896 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003897
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003898- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3899 Nick Mathewson.
3900
3901Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003903
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003904- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3905 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3906 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3907 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3908 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3909 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3910 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3911 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3912
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003913- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3914 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3915 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3916 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3917
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003918- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3919 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3920 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3921 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3922 come a long way).
3923
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003924- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3925 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3926 write filters for these warnings).
3927
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003928- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3929 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3930 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3931 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3932 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3933
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003934- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3935 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3936 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3937 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3938 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3939 older distribution.
3940
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003941Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003943
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003944- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3945 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003946 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003947
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003948- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3949 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3950 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3951
3952- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3953
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003954- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3955
3956- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3957
3958- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3959
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003961
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003962- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3963
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003964New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003965-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003966
3967C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003969
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003970- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3971 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3972 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3973 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3974 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3975 against buffer overruns.
3976
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003977- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003978 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3979 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003980 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3981 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3982 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3983
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003984- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3985 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3986 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3987 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3988 deprecated.
3989
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003990Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003992
3993- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3994 relevant is found.
3995
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003996
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003997What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003998===========================
3999
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4001
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004002Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004004
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004005- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4006 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4007 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4008 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4009 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4010 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4011 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4012 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004013 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004014 repaired.
4015
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004016- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004017 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004018 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4019 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4020 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4021 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4022 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4023 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4024 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4025 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4026
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004027- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4028 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4029 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4030 leading BMO character).
4031
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004032- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4033 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4034 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4035
4036 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4037 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4038 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004039
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004040 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4041 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4042 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4043 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4044 for various simple to use conversions.
4045
4046 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4047 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4048
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004049 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4050 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4051 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4052 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4053 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4054 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4055 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4056 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4057 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4058 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4059 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4060 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4061 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4062 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4063 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004064
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004065- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4066 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4067 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004068 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004069 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004070
4071 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004072 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4073 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4074 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4075 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4076 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004077 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4078 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004079
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004080 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4081 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4082 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004083 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004084
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004085- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4086 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4087 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4088 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4089 floating arithmetic,
4090
4091 x = 9007199254740992.0
4092 print long(x)
4093
4094 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4095 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4096 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4097 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4098 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4099 functions are of good quality).
4100
4101 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4102 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4103 algorithms to break.
4104
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004105- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4106 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4107 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4108 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4109 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4110 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4111 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4112 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4113 order.
4114
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004115- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4116 operation along the most common code paths.
4117
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004118- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4119 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4120
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004121- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4122 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4123 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4124 {}.update(UserDict())
4125
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004126- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4127 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4128 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4129 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4130 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4131 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4132 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4133 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4134
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004135- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004136 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004138 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004139 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4140 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004141 join() method of strings
4142 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004143 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4144 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004146 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004147
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004148- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4149 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4150
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004151- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4152 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4153
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004154- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4155 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4156 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4157 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4158
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004159- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4160 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004161 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004162 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4163 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004164
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004165- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4166
4167
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004168Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004170
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004171- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004172 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004173 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4174 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4175
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004176- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4177 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4178
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004179- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4180 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4181 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4182 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4183
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004184- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4185 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4186 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4187
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004188- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4189
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004190- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4191
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004192- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4193 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4194 that are still imported into string.py).
4195
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004196- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4197
4198- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4199 Now it does.
4200
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004201- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4202
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004203- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4204 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4205 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4206 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4207 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004208 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4209 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004210
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004211- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4212 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4213 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4214 'help(object)'.
4215
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004216Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004218
4219- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004220 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004221 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4222 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4223
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004224- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004225 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4226 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004227
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004228C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004230
4231- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4232 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233
4234----
4235
4236**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**