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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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +000015- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
16 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
17 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
18 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
19 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
20
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +000021- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
22
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +000023- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
24 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
25
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +000026- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
27 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
28 modified the list.
29
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000030- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
31 functions is now writable.
32
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000033- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
34 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
35 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
36 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
37
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000038- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
39 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
40 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
41 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
42 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000043
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000044- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
45 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
46
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000047Extension modules
48-----------------
49
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000050- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
51 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
52 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
53 supposed to have been truncated away.
54
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000055- Added socket.socketpair().
56
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +000057- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
58 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
59
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000060Library
61-------
62
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +000063- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
64 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +000065
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +000066- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
67 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
68
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +000069- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
70
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +000071- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
72
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +000073- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
74
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +000075- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
76 Percivall.
77
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +000078- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
79 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
80
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000081- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
82 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
83 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +000084 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +000085
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +000086- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
87 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
88 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
89 and exponent.
90
91- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
92
93- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
94 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
95 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
96
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +000097- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
98 to the readline module.
99
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000100- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000101 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
102 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000103
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000104- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
105 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
106 contains symlinks.
107
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000108- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
109 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
110
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000111- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
112 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
113 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
114
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000115- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
116 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
117 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
118 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
119 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
120 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
121 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
122 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
123 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
124 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
125 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
126 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
127 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
128
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000129- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
130
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000131Tools/Demos
132-----------
133
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000134- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
135 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
136
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000137- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
138
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000139Build
140-----
141
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000142- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
143 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
144
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000145- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
146 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
147
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000148- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
149 GNU/k*BSD systems.
150
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000151- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
152 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
153
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000154C API
155-----
156
157Documentation
158-------------
159
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000160- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
161 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
162
163- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
164 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
165 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000166
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000167New platforms
168-------------
169
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000170- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
171
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000172Tests
173-----
174
175Windows
176-------
177
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000178- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
179 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
180 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
181 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
182 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
183 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
184 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
185 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
186 the problem.
187
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000188Mac
189---
190
191
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000192What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
193=================================
194
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000195*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000196
197Core and builtins
198-----------------
199
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000200- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
201 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
202 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
203 sensitive code.
204
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000205- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
206 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
207 @staticmethod
208 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000209 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000210
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000211- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
212 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
213 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
214 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
215 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
216 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
217 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
218 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
219 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
220 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
221 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
222
223 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
224 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
225 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
226 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
227 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
228 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
229 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
230
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000231- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
232 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
233
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000234- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000235 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000236
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000237- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000238 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000239 which was missing for no apparent reason.
240
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000241- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000242 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
243 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
244
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000245- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
246 types that support garbage collection.
247
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000248- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
249
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000250- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
251 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
252 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
253 Jython.
254
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000255- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
256
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000257- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
258 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
259
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000260- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
261 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
262 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000263
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000264- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
265 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
266 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
267
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000268Extension modules
269-----------------
270
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000271- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
272
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000273Library
274-------
275
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000276- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
277 TIS-620
278
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000279- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
280 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
281 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
282 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
283 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
284 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
285 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
286 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
287 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
288 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
289
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000290- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
291
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000292- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
293 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
294 same as when the argument is omitted).
295 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
296
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000297- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
298
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000299- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
300 schemes are offered.
301
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000302- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
303
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000304- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
305 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
306 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
307
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000308- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
309
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000310- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
311 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
312
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000313- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
314 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
315 when dummy_threading is being used.
316
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000317- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
318 from a tarfile.
319
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000320- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000321 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000322
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000323- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
324 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
325 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
326 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
327
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000328- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
329 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
330
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000331- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
332 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
333 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
334 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
335 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
336 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
337 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
338 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
339 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
340 by some other method in progress).
341
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000342- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
343 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
344 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000345
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000346- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
347
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000348- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
349 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
350 AM Kuchling.
351
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000352- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
353 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
354 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
355
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000356- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
357 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
358 instead of unsigned.
359
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000360- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000361 no longer part of the public API.
362
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000363- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
364 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
365 string methods of the same name).
366
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000367- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000368 SF patch 945642.
369
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000370- doctest unittest integration improvements:
371
372 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
373
374 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
375 DocTestSuites.
376
377- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
378 that provide thread-local data.
379
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000380- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
381 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
382
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000383- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
384
385- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
386 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
387 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
388
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000389- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
390
391 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
392 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
393 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000394
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000395 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
396 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
397 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
398 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
399
400 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
401 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
402
403 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
404 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
405 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
406 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
407
408 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
409 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
410 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
411 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
412 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
413
414 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
415 wrapping help output.
416
417 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
418 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
419 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000420
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000421C API
422-----
423
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000424- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
425 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
426 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
427 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
428 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
429 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
430 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
431 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
432 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
433 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
434 its visible semantics have not changed.
435
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000436- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
437 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
438
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000439Documentation
440-------------
441
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000442- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000443
444 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000445 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000446
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000447 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000448
449 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
450
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000451- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000452
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000453Tests
454-----
455
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000456- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000457 platforms that use the Makefile.
458
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000459- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
460 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
461 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
462
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000463
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000464What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
465=================================
466
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000467*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000468
469Core and builtins
470-----------------
471
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000472- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
473 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
474 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
475 objects now (one object instead of three).
476
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000477- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
478 Windows DLLs.
479
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000480- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
481 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000482
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000483- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
484 a new .pyc magic.
485
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000486- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
487 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
488 be there.
489
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000490- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
491 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
492 the LC_NUMERIC category.
493
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000494- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
495 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
496 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
497
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000498- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
499
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000500- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
501 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
502 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000503
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000504- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
505 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
506
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000507- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
508
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000509- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000510 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000511
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000512- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
513
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000514- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
515
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000516- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
517 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
518
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000519- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
520 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
521 Fixes bug #858016 .
522
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000523- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
524 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
525 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
526
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000527- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
528 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
529 improves their performance (about 35%).
530
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000531- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
532 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
533 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
534
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000535- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
536 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
537 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
538 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
539
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000540- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
541 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
542 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
543 length is not known).
544
545- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
546 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000547 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
548 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000549 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
550
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000551- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
552 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
553
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000554- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
555 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
556 keyword arguments.
557
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000558- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
559 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
560 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
561
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000562- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
563 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
564 cases.
565
566- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
567 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
568 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
569 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
570 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
571 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
572 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
573 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
574 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
575 a release build.
576
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000577- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
578 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
579
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000580- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000581 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000582
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000583- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
584 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
585 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
586 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
587 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
588 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
589 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
590 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
591 destroyed.
592
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000593- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
594 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
595 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
596 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
597 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
598 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
599 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
600 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
601
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000602- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
603 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
604 character other than a space.
605
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000606- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
607 by the function object or by the method object, the function
608 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
609 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
610 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
611 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
612 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
613 attributes with the same name.
614
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000615- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
616 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
617 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
618 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
619 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
620 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
621 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
622 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
623 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
624 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
625 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
626 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
627 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
628 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000629
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000630- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
631 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
632 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
633 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
634 This has been repaired.
635
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000636- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
637
638- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
639
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000640- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
641 over a sequence.
642
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000643- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000644 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000645
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000646- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
647
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000648- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
649 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
650 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
651 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
652 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
653 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
654 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
655 records with equal keys is unchanged).
656
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000657- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
658 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
659 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
660
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000661- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
662 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
663 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
664 freelist.
665
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000666- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
667 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
668
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000669- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
670 number.
671
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000672- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
673 a TypeError exception.
674
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000675- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
676 820195.
677
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000678- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
679 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
680 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
681
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000682- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000683 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
684 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000685
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000686- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
687 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
688 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
689
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000690- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
691 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000692 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000693
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000694- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000695 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
696 the first call.
697
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000698
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000699Extension modules
700-----------------
701
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000702- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
703 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
704
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000705- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
706 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
707 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
708 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
709 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
710 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
711 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000712
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000713- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
714
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000715- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
716
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000717- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
718 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
719
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000720- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
721 fewer false positives.
722
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000723- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
724 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
725
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000726- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000727 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
728
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000729- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000730 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000731 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
732 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
733 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000734
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000735- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
736 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
737 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
738 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
739
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000740- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
741 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
742 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
743 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
744 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
745 #897625.
746
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000747- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
748 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
749
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000750- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
751 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
752 and pops on either side of the deque.
753
754- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
755 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
756
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000757- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
758 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
759 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
760 other functions that expect a function argument.
761
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000762- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
763
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000764- os.getsid was added.
765
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000766- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
767 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
768 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
769
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000770- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
771
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000772- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
773
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000774- readline.clear_history was added.
775
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000776- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
777
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000778- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
779
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000780- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
781
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000782- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
783
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000784- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
785
786- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
787
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000788- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
789
790- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
791
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000792- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
793 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
794 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
795
796- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
797 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
798 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
799 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
800 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
801 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
802 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
803
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000804- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
805 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
806 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
807 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000808
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000809- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000810 iterators from a single iterable.
811
812- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
813 of raising a TypeError exception.
814
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000815- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
816 as parameter.
817
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000818Library
819-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000820
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000821- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
822 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
823 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000824
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000825- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
826 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
827 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000828
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000829- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000830
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000831- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
832 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000833
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000834- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
835 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
836
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000837- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
838
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000839- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000840 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000841
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000842- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
843 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
844
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000845- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
846
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000847- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
848 on cygwin and mingw32.
849
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000850- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
851
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000852- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
853 module.
854
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000855- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
856 installation scheme for all platforms.
857
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000858- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000859 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000860
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000861- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
862 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
863 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
864
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000865- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
866 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
867 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
868
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000869- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
870
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000871- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
872
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000873- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
874 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
875
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000876- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
877 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
878 type pattern with the same value exists.
879
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000880- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
881 when run from the command prompt).
882
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000883- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
884 not taken into consideration when caching value.
885
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000886- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
887 default sort).
888
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000889- Added global runctx function to profile module
890
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000891- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
892
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000893- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
894
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000895- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
896
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000897- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000898 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
899 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
900 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
901 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
902 accordingly.
903
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000904- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
905 decoding standards.
906
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000907- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
908 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
909 called for all requests.
910
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000911- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
912 they are passed to the compiler.
913
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000914- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
915 indent, width and depth.
916
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000917- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
918 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
919
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000920- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
921 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
922
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000923- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
924
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000925- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
926
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000927- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
928
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000929- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
930 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
931
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000932- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000933 for better performance.
934
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000935- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000936
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000937- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
938 a string).
939
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000940- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
941
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000942- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
943
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000944- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
945
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000946- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
947
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000948- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
949 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
950 list of fieldnames.
951
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000952- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
953 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
954
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000955- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
956
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000957- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
958 empty lists.
959
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000960- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
961 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
962 and shelves.
963
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000964- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
965 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
966
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000967- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000968 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
969 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000970
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000971- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
972 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000973 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000974
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000975- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000976 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
977 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
978
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000979- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
980 and removed in Py2.4.
981
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000982- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
983
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000984- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
985
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000986Tools/Demos
987-----------
988
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000989- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
990 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
991
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000992- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
993
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000994- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
995 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
996 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
997 destination in situations where both files are given.
998
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000999- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1000 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1001 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1002 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1003
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001004- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1005
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001006- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1007 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1008 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1009 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1010 now.
1011
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001012- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1013 in effect
1014
1015- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1016 C-c C-h
1017
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001018- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1019 -d option was given.
1020
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001021Build
1022-----
1023
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001024- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1025 build under OS X.
1026
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001027- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1028 --enable-profiling.
1029
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001030- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1031 is configured --with-tsc.
1032
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001033- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1034 on AMD64.
1035
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001036- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1037 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1038
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001039- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1040 removed.
1041
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001042- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1043 supported (see PEP 11).
1044
1045- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1046
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001047- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1048
1049- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1050 (see PEP 11).
1051
1052- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1053 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1054
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001055C API
1056-----
1057
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001058- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1059 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1060 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1061
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001062- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1063 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1064 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1065 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1066
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001067- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1068 generator objects.
1069
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001070- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1071 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001072 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1073 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001074
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001075- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1076 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1077
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001078- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1079 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1080 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1081 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1082 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1083
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001084- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1085 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1086 about 10% faster.
1087
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001088- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1089 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1090
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001091- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1092 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1093 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1094 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1095
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001096Windows
1097-------
1098
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001099- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1100 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1101 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1102 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1103
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001104- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1105 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1106 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1107
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001108
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001109What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1110===============================
1111
1112*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1113
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001114IDLE
1115----
1116
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001117- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1118 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1119 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1120 context-menu actions.
1121
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001122- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1123 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1124 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1125 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1126 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1127 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1128 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1129 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1130 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1131
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001132
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001133What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1134=============================================
1135
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001136*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001137
1138Core and builtins
1139-----------------
1140
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001141- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001142 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001143 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1144
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001145Extension modules
1146-----------------
1147
1148- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1149 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1150 than once. This has been fixed.
1151
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001152- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1153 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1154 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1155 call.
1156
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001157- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1158
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001159Library
1160-------
1161
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001162- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1163 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1164
1165- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1166 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1167 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1168 restored.
1169
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001170IDLE
1171----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001172
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001173- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001174
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001175Build
1176-----
1177
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001178- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1179 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1180
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001181C API
1182-----
1183
1184Windows
1185-------
1186
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001187- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1188 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1189
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001190- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1191
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001192Mac
1193---
1194
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001195- Various fixes to pimp.
1196
1197- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1198
1199- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1200 more problems than it solves.
1201
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001202
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001203What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1204=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001205
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001206*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1207
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001208Core and builtins
1209-----------------
1210
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001211- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1212 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1213
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001214- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1215 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001216 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001217
1218- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1219 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1220 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001221 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001222
1223- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1224 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001225
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001226- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1227 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1228 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1229
1230- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001231 770247.
1232
1233- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001234
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001235Extension modules
1236-----------------
1237
1238- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1239 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1240
1241- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1242
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001243- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1244
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001245- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1246 contained within the _strptime module.
1247
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001248- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1249 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1250
1251- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001252 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1253
1254- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1255 the find_class attribute, if present.
1256
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001257- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001258
1259 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1260 (SF bug 763298).
1261
1262 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001263 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1264 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1265 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001266
1267 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1268
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001269Library
1270-------
1271
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001272- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1273
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001274- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1275 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1276 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1277 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1278 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1279 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1280 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1281 or Tester().
1282
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001283- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1284 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1285 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1286 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1287 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1288 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1289 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1290 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1291 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001292
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001293 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001294
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001295- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1296 weren't before was an oversight.
1297
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001298- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1299 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1300
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001301- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1302 when there are no lines.
1303
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001304- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1305 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1306
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001307- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1308 to child processes.
1309
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001310- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1311
1312- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1313
1314- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1315 xmlrpclib.
1316
1317- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1318 responses.
1319
1320- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1321 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1322
1323- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1324 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1325 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1326
1327- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1328 used as patterns.
1329
1330- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1331 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1332 than Tk 8.3.
1333
1334- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1335
1336- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001337
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001338Tools/Demos
1339-----------
1340
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001341- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1342
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001343- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1344
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001345- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001346
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001347Build
1348-----
1349
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001350- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1351
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001352- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1353
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001354- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1355 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001356
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001357- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1358 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1359 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001360
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001361C API
1362-----
1363
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001364- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1365 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1366
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001367Windows
1368-------
1369
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001370- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1371 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1372 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1373 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1374 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1375 Python exception ::
1376
1377 thread.error: can't start new thread
1378
1379 is raised now.
1380
1381- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1382 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1383 instead of from DLL teardown.
1384
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001385Mac
1386---
1387
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001388- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001389 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001390 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1391 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1392 the executable in the bundle.
1393
1394- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001395
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001396- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1397
1398- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1399 on Panther.
1400
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001401What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1402================================
1403
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001404*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001405
1406Core and builtins
1407-----------------
1408
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001409- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1410 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1411 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1412 with the -i option.
1413
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001414- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1415 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1416
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001417- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1418 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1419
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001420- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1421 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1422 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1423 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1424 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1425 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1426 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1427 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1428 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1429 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1430 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1431 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1432 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001433
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001434- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1435 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1436 embedded in a lambda expression.
1437
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001438- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1439 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1440 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1441 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1442 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1443
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001444- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1445 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1446 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1447
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001448- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1449 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1450
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001451- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1452 It's writable again.
1453
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001454- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1455 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1456 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001457 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001458
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001459- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1460 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1461 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1462
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001463Extension modules
1464-----------------
1465
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001466- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1467 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1468
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001469- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1470 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1471 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1472 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1473
1474- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1475 collection.
1476
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001477- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1478 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1479 unique within a single program run.
1480
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001481- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1482 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1483
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001484- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1485 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1486
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001487- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1488 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001489
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001490- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1491
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001492- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1493 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1494
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001495- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1496 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1497 for many BSD-derived systems.
1498
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001499
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001500Library
1501-------
1502
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001503- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1504 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1505 primary ones:
1506
1507 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1508 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1509 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1510
1511 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1512 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1513 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1514 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1515 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1516 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1517
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001518- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1519 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1520 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1521 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1522 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1523 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1524 argument.
1525
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001526- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1527 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1528 in the archive.
1529
1530- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1531 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1532
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001533- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1534 569574).
1535
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001536- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1537 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1538 no more.
1539
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001540- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1541 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1542 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1543 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1544 code coverage.
1545
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001546- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1547 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1548 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001549 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1550 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001551
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001552- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1553 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1554 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001555 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001556
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001557- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1558
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001559- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1560 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1561 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1562 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1563
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001564- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1565 handling.
1566
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001567- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1568 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1569
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001570- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1571 in socket.py.
1572
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001573- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1574
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001575- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1576 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1577 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1578 opener with proxy support.
1579
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001580- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1581
1582- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1583
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001584Tools/Demos
1585-----------
1586
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001587- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1588
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001589- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1590
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001591- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1592 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001593
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001594- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1595 files.
1596
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001597Build
1598-----
1599
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001600- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001601 different root directory.
1602
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001603C API
1604-----
1605
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001606- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1607 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1608 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1609 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1610 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1611 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1612 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1613 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1614 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1615 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1616
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001617- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1618 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1619 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1620 from Python.
1621
1622
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001623New platforms
1624-------------
1625
1626None this time.
1627
1628Tests
1629-----
1630
1631- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1632 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1633
1634Windows
1635-------
1636
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001637- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1638
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001639- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1640 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1641 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1642 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1643 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1644 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1645 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1646 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1647 that's what it's for.
1648
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001649Mac
1650---
1651
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001652- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1653 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1654 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1655 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001656- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1657 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1658- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001659
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001660SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1661------------------------------------
1662
1663430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1664598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1665622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1666661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1667683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1668697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1669713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1670724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1671727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1672729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1673730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1674731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1675732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1676733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1677735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1678740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1679744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1680745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1681747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1682749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1683751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1684753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1685755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1686757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1687760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1688
1689
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001690What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1691================================
1692
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001693*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001694
1695Core and builtins
1696-----------------
1697
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001698- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1699 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1700
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001701- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1702 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1703 and cannot be strings).
1704
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001705- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1706 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1707 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1708 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1709
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001710- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1711 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1712 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1713 Python itself.
1714
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001715- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1716 the referenced object, if it has one.
1717
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001718- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1719 the thread started at
1720 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1721
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001722- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1723 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1724 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1725 placed on a list index.
1726
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001727- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1728 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1729 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1730 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1731
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001732- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1733 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1734 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1735 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1736 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1737 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1738 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1739
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001740- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1741 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1742 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1743 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1744 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1745
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001746- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1747 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001748
1749- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1750 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1751 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1752 #693195.)
1753
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001754- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1755 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001756
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001757- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001758 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001759 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1760 interpreter executions, would fail.
1761
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001762- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001763 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001764 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001765
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001766Extension modules
1767-----------------
1768
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001769- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1770 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1771 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1772 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1773
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001774- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1775 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1776
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001777- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1778 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1779 and Greg Chapman.)
1780
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001781- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1782 recursively.
1783
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001784- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001785 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1786 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1787 leaks.
1788
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001789- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1790
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001791- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1792 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1793 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1794 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1795 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1796 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1797 #705836.
1798
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001799- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001800 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1801
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001802- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1803 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1804 See SF bug #692416.
1805
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001806- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1807 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1808
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001809- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1810 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1811 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001812
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001813- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001814 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1815 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1816
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001817- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1818 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1819 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1820 timeouts to work properly.
1821
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001822Library
1823-------
1824
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001825- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1826 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1827 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1828 future release.
1829
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001830- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1831 for querying platform dependent features.
1832
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001833- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001834
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001835- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1836 pickle protocol versions.
1837
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001838- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1839 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1840 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1841
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001842- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1843
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001844- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1845 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1846 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1847 modules.
1848
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001849- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1850 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1851 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1852
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001853- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1854 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1855
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001856- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1857 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1858 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1859
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001860- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001861 MS Office extensions.
1862
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001863- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1864 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1865
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001866- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1867 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1868
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001869- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1870 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1871 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1872 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1873 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1874 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1875
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001876- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1877 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1878 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001879
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001880- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1881 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1882 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1883
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001884- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1885
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001886- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1887 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1888 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1889
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001890Tools/Demos
1891-----------
1892
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001893- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1894 See the module docstring for details.
1895
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001896Build
1897-----
1898
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001899- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1900 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001901
1902C API
1903-----
1904
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001905- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1906
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001907- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1908 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1909 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1910
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001911- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1912 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001913
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001914 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1915 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1916 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001917
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001918- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001919 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1920
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001921- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1922 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1923 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001924
1925New platforms
1926-------------
1927
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001928None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001929
1930Tests
1931-----
1932
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001933- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1934 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001935
1936Windows
1937-------
1938
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001939- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1940 function.
1941
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001942- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1943 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001944
1945Mac
1946---
1947
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001948- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1949 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001950
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001951- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1952 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001953
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001954- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1955 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1956 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001957
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001958- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001959 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1960 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001961
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001962- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1963 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001964
1965
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001966What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1967=================================
1968
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001969*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001970
1971Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001972-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001973
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001974- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1975 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1976 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1977
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001978- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1979 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1980 (SF patch #664376.)
1981
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001982- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1983 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1984 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1985 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1986 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1987 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001988 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001989
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001990- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1991 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1992 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1993 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001994 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001995
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001996- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1997 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1998 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1999 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2000 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2001 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2002 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2003 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2004 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2005 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2006 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2007
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002008- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2009 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2010 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2011 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2012 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2013 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2014
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002015- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2016 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2017
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002018- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2019 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2020 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2021 case.)
2022
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002023- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2024 passed as unicode strings.
2025
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002026- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2027 See SF bug #683467.
2028
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002029- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2030 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2031
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002032- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2033
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002034- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2035
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002036- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2037 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2038 arguments.
2039
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002040- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2041 See SF bug #667147.
2042
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002043- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002044 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002045 See SF bug #676155.
2046
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002047- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002048 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002049 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2050 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2051 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2052 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2053 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2054 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002055
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002056Extension modules
2057-----------------
2058
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002059- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2060 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2061 tp_as_number pointer.
2062
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002063- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2064 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2065 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2066 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2067 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2068
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002069- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2070
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002071- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2072
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002073- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002074 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002075 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2076 patch #678531.)
2077
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002078- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2079 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2080
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002081- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2082 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2083
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002084- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2085
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002086- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2087 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2088 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2089
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002090- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2091
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002092- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2093 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2094
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002095- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002096
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002097- datetime changes:
2098
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002099 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2100
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002101 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2102 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2103 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2104 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2105 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2106 now.
2107
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002108 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002109 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2110 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002111
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002112 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002113 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002114 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2115 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2116 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2117 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002118
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002119 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2120 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2121 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002122 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2123
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002124 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2125 by a later example coded by Guido.
2126
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002127 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002128 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2129 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2130 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002131 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2132 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2133
2134 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2135 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2136 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2137 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2138 tzinfo subclass instance.
2139
2140 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2141 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2142 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2143 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2144 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2145 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2146 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2147 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002148
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002149 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2150 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2151 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2152 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2153 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002154 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2155
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002156 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002157
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002158 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2159 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2160 as a naive datetime object.
2161
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002162 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2163 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2164 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2165
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002166 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2167 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2168 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2169 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2170 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2171 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2172 comparison.
2173
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002174 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2175 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2176 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2177 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002178 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002179
2180 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002181
2182 and ::
2183
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002184 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2185
2186 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2187 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2188 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2189 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2190
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002191 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2192 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2193 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2194 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2195 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2196
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002197 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2198 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002199 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2200 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002201
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002202Library
2203-------
2204
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002205- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2206 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2207
2208- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2209 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2210 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2211 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2212 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2213 See PEP 307 for details.
2214
2215- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2216 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2217
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002218- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2219 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002220 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002221 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2222 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002223 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002224
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002225- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2226 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2227
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002228- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2229 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2230 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2231
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002232- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2233
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002234- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2235 exception.
2236
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002237- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2238 class.
2239
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002240- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2241 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2242 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2243
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002244- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2245 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2246
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002247- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002248 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2249 See SF bug #659228.
2250
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002251- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2252 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2253 See SF patch #651082.
2254
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002255- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002256
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002257- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2258 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2259
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002260- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002261 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002262
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002263- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2264 DOS paths from other platforms.
2265
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002266Tools/Demos
2267-----------
2268
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002269- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2270 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2271 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2272 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2273 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2274 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2275 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2276 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2277 example:
2278
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002279 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2280 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002281
2282 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2283
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002284
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002285Build
2286-----
2287
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002288- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2289 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2290 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002291 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2292
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002293 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2294
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002295- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2296 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2297 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2298 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2299 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2300 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2301 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2302 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2303 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2304
2305- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2306 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2307 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2308 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2309
2310- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2311 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2312
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002313C API
2314-----
2315
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002316- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2317 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002318
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002319- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2320 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2321 tp_as_number pointer.
2322
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002323- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2324 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2325 (SF #681367)
2326
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002327- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2328 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2329 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2330 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002331
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002332Tests
2333-----
2334
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002335- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002336 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2337 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2338 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2339 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2340 pydoc.)
2341
2342- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2343
2344- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002345
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002346Windows
2347-------
2348
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002349- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2350 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2351 time).
2352
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002353- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2354 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2355
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002356- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2357 release without strong cryptography.
2358
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002359- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002360 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002361
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002362- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2363 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2364
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002365Mac
2366---
2367
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002368- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2369 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002370
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002371- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2372 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2373 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002374
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002375- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2376 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002377
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002378- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2379 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2380 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2381 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002382
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002383- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002384 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2385 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2386 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002387
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002388
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002389What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002390=================================
2391
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002392*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002393
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002394Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002395--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002396
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002397- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2398
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002399- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2400 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002401 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002402 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002403 a different meaning than before.
2404
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002405- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002406 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002407 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002408
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002409- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002410 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002411 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002412
2413- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2414 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2415 and deallocation.
2416
2417- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2418 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2419
2420- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2421 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2422 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2423 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2424 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2425
2426- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2427 now detected by the garbage collector.
2428
2429- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2430 [SF bug 519621]
2431
2432- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2433 identifier.
2434
2435- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2436 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2437 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2438 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2439 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2440 [SF bug 563060]
2441
2442- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2443 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2444 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2445 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2446 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2447
2448- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2449 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2450 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2451
2452- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2453
2454- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2455 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2456 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2457 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2458 state of the slots would be lost.)
2459
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002460Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002461-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002462
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002463- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002464 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2465 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2466 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2467 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002468 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2469 Jython 2.1.
2470
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002471- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002472 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002473 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2474 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2475 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2476 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2477 these, see PEP 302.
2478
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002479- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2480 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2481 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2482
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002483- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2484 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2485 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2486
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002487- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2488 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2489 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2490
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002491- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2492 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2493 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2494 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2495 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2496 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2497 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2498 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2499 releases or implementations.
2500
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002501- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002502 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2503 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002504
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002505- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2506 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2507
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002508- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2509 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2510 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2511
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002512- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2513 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2514
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002515- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2516 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002517 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2518 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002519
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002520- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2521 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2522 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2523 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2524 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2525
2526 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2527 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2528 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2529 pattern.
2530
2531 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2532 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2533 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2534 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2535
2536 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2537 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2538 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2539 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2540 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2541 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2542
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002543- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2544 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2545 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2546 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2547 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2548 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2549 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2550 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002551
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002552- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2553 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2554 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2555 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2556 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002557 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2558 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2559 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2560 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2561 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2562 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2563 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002564
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002565- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2566 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2567
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002568- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2569 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2570 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2571 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2572 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2573 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2574 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2575 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2576 to Zack Weinberg!
2577
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002578- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2579 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2580 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2581 type. This has been fixed now.
2582
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002583- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2584 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2585 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2586
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002587- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2588 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2589 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2590 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2591 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2592 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2593 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2594 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002595 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002596
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002597- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2598 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2599 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002600
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002601- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2602 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2603 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2604 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2605 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2606 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2607 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2608 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002609 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002610 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2611 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2612
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002613- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2614 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2615 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2616 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2617 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2618 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2619 this.)
2620
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002621- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2622 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002623 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002624 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002625 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2626 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002627 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2628 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002629
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002630- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2631 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2632 currently running.
2633
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002634- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2635 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2636 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2637 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2638
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002639- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2640 as directory names.
2641
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002642- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2643 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2644
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002645- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2646 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2647
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002648- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002649 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2650 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002651
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002652- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2653 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2654 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2655 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2656 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2657
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002658- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2659 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2660 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2661 removed.
2662
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002663- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2664 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2665 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2666
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002667- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2668 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2669 to __debug__.
2670
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002671- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2672 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2673 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2674
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002675- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2676 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2677 deprecated now.
2678
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002679- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2680 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2681 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002682
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002683- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2684 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2685 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2686 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2687 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002688
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002689- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2690 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2691
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002692- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2693 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2694 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002695 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002696 is backward compatible.
2697
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002698- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2699 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2700 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2701 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2702 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2703
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002704- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2705 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2706 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2707 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2708 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2709 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002710
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002711- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2712 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2713
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002714- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2715 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2716
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002717- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2718 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2719 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2720 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2721 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2722
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002723- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2724 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2725 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2726
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002727- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002728 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2729
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002730- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2731 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2732 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002733
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002734- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2735 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2736
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002737- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2738 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2739 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2740
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002741- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2742
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002743Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002744-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002745
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002746- Added three operators to the operator module:
2747 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2748 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2749 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2750
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002751- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2752
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002753- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2754 archives.
2755
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002756- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2757 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2758 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2759
2760 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2761
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002762- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2763 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2764 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002765 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002766
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002767- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2768 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2769 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2770 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002771 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2772 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2773 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2774 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002775
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002776- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2777 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002778
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002779- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2780
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002781- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2782 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2783
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002784- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2785 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2786 supported.
2787
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002788- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2789
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002790- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2791 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002792
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002793- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2794 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2795
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002796- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2797
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002798- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2799 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2800
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002801- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2802 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2803 functions but callable type objects.
2804
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002805- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002806 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002807 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002808
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002809- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2810 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002811
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002812- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2813 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002814
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002815- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2816 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2817 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2818 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2819
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002820- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2821 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002822
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002823- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2824 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2825 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2826 and __imul__.
2827
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002828- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002829 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2830 is called.
2831
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002832- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2833 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2834 interpreter was compiled.
2835
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002836- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2837 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2838 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002839 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002840 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2841 1, not 2.
2842
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002843- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2844 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2845 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2846 limit.
2847
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002848- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2849 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2850 bug #623464.
2851
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002852- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2853 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2854 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2855 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2856
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002857Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002858-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002859
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002860- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2861
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002862- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2863 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2864 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2865 with Python 2.3a2.
2866
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002867- os.path exposes getctime.
2868
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002869- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002870 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002871 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002872 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002873 unit tests of floating point results.
2874
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002875- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2876 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2877 has been increased.
2878
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002879- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2880 executed.
2881
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002882- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2883 postinstallation script.
2884
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002885- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2886 test the current module.
2887
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002888- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002889 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2890 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2891 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2892 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2893
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002894- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002895 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002896 Ward's Optik package.
2897
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002898- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2899 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2900 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2901 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2902
2903- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2904 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002905 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002906
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002907- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2908 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2909 shelf are binary pickles.
2910
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002911- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2912 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2913
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002914- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2915 modules are iterators now.
2916
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002917- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2918 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2919 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2920 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2921 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2922 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002923
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002924- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2925 with their entity value.
2926
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002927- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2928
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002929- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2930 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002931
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002932- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2933 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002934 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002935
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002936- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2937 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2938 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2939 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2940 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2941 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2942 main():
2943
2944 import locale
2945 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2946
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002947- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2948 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2949
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002950- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2951 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2952 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2953 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2954 to the new standard.
2955
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002956- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2957 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2958 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2959 an extension to the database.
2960
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002961- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2962 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2963 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2964 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002965 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002966
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002967- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002968 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002969
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002970- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2971 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2972 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2973 bounded integers.
2974
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002975- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2976 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2977 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2978 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2979 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2980 in existence.
2981
2982 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2983 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2984 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2985 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2986 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2987 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2988
2989 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2990 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2991 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2992 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2993
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002994- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2995 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2996 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2997
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002998- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2999
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003000- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3001 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3002 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3003 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3004
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003005- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3006 argument.
3007
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003008- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3009 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3010 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3011 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3012 [SF patch 560794].
3013
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003014- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3015 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3016 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003017 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3018 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3019 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003020
3021- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3022 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003023
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003024- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3025 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3026 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3027 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003028
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003029- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3030 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3031 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3032 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3033 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3034
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003035- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003036
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003037- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3038
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003039- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3040 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3041 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3042 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3043 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3044 identical to None.
3045
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003046- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3047 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3048 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3049 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3050 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3051 results now.
3052
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003053- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3054 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3055
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003056- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3057 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3058 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3059 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3060 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3061 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3062 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3063 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3064
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003065- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3066
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003067- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3068 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3069
3070- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3071 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3072 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3073 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3074 and other systems.
3075
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003076- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3077 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3078 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3079 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 +00003080 work well with these.
3081
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003082- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3083
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003084- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003085 connections.
3086
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003087- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3088 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3089 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3090
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003091- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3092 sets
3093
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003094- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3095 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3096 name.
3097
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003098- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3099 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3100 passed in.
3101
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003102- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003103 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003104 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3105 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003106
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003107- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3108
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003109- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3110
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003111- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3112 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3113 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3114
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003115- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3116 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3117 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3118 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003119 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003120
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003121- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003122 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003123 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003124
3125- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3126 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3127 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3128
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003129- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003130 the value of its expression argument.
3131
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003132- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3133 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3134 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3135
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003136- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3137 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3138 skipstone browser was included.
3139
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003140- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3141 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3142
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003143Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003144-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003145
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003146- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3147 names in addition to accepting file names.
3148
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003149- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3150 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3151 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3152 still used and useful.)
3153
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003154- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3155 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3156 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3157 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003158
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003159- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3160 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3161 the generated binary.
3162
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003163Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003165
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003166- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3167
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003168- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3169 except in the hands of experts.
3170
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003171- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003172 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3173 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3174 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003175
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003176- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3177 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3178 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3179 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3180 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3181 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3182 builds.
3183
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003184- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3185 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3186 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3187 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3188 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3189 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3190 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3191 new type.
3192
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003193- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003194
3195 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3196 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3197 positive infinities.
3198
3199 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3200 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3201 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3202 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3203 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3204 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3205 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3206
3207 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3208
3209 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3210
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003211- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3212 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3213 size of the executable.
3214
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003215- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3216 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3217 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3218 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003219
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003220- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3221
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003222- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3223 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3224 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003225
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003226- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3227 well as Unix.
3228
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003229- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3230 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3231 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3232 modules in the README file for details.
3233
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003234C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003236
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003237- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3238 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003239 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003240 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003241 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003242
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003243- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3244 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3245 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3246 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3247 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3248 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003249 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003250 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3251 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3252 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3253 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3254 aligned.)
3255
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003256- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3257 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3258 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3259
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003260- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3261 level.
3262
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003263- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3264 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3265 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3266 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3267 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3268
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003269- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3270 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3271 code.
3272
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003273- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3274 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3275 adjusting for negative indices.
3276
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003277- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3278 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3279 object.
3280
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003281- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3282 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3283 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3284
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003285- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3286 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003287
3288- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3289
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003290- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3291 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3292 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3293 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3294
3295- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3296
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003297- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003298
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003299- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003300 without going through the buffer API.
3301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003302- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003303
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003304- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3305 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3306 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3307 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003309- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3310 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3311
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003312- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003313 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3314
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003315New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003317
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003318- OpenVMS is now supported.
3319
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003320- AtheOS is now supported.
3321
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003322- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3323
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003324- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003326Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327-----
3328
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003329- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3330 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3331 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003332
3333Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003335
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003336- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3337 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3338 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3339 bugs.
3340 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003341 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003342 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3343 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003344 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003345
3346- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003347 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003348
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003349- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3350 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3351
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003352- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3353 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003354 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003355 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3356
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003357- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3358 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3359 use files" uninstall option).
3360
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003361- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3362
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003363- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3364 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3365
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003366- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3367 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3368 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3369
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003370- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3371 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3372 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3373 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3374 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003375 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3376 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3377 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003378
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003379- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003380 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003381 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3382 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3383 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3384 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3385 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3386 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3387 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3388 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3389 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3390 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3391 work around.
3392
3393- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3394 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3395 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3396 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3397 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3398 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3399 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3400 specified with O_CREAT too).
3401
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003402Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003403----
3404
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003405- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003406
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003407- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3408 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3409 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3410
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003411- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3412 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3413 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3414
3415- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3416 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3417 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3418 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3419 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3420 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3421 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3422 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003423
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003424- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3425 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3426 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003427
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003428- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3429 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3430 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3431 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3432 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003433
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003434- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3435 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3436 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003437
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003438- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3439 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003441- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3442 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3443 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3444 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3445 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003447- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3448 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3449 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3450
3451- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3452 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3453 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003454
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003455- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3456 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3457 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3458 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003459 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003460
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003461- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3462 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003463
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003464- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3465 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003466
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003467- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003468 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003469 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3470 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003471
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003472
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003473What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003474===============================
3475
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3477
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003478Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003480
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003481- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3482 with a custom metaclass.
3483
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003484Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003486
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003487- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3488 are proxies.
3489
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003490Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003491-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003492
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003493- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3494 very short strings.
3495
3496- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3497 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3498 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3499 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3500 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3501
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003502Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003504
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003505- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3506 close or delete time).
3507
3508- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3509 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3510
3511- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3512
3513- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003514 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003515
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003516Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003517-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003518
3519Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003521
3522C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003524
3525New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003527
3528Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003530
3531Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003533
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003534- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3535
3536- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3537 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3538
3539- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3540 deleted at process exit time.
3541
3542- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3543 in backslash.
3544
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003545Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003547
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003548- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3549 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3550 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3551
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003552
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003553What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003554===========================
3555
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3557
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003558Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003559--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003560
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003561- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3562 been extensively updated. See
3563
3564 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3565
3566 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3567
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003568- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3569 deleted!
3570
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003571- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3572 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3573 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3574 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3575 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3576
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003577- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3578
3579 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3580 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3581
3582 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3583 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3584 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3585 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3586 supported anyway.
3587
3588 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3589 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3590
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003591- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3592 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3593 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3594 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3595 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003596
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003597- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3598 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3599 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3600
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003601Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003602-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003603
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003604- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3605 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3606 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3607 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3608 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3609 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003610 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3611 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3612 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3613 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003614
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003615- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3616 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3617 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3618
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003619Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003621
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003622- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3623
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003624Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003626
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003627- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3628 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3629 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3630 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3631 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3632 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3633
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003634- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3635
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003636- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3637
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003638- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3639
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003640- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3641 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3642 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3643
3644- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3645
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003646Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003648
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003649- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3650 off a search on Google.
3651
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003652Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003653-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003654
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003655- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3656 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3657 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3658 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3659 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3660 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3661 other platforms should do likewise.
3662
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003663- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3664 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3665 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3666
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003667C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003668-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003669
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003670- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3671 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3672 producing key-value pairs.
3673
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003674- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003675 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003676 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3677 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3678 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3679 previously went unchallenged.
3680
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003681New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003682-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003683
3684Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003685-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003686
3687Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003689
3690Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003692
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003693- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3694 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003695
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003696- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3697 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3698 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3699 home.
3700
3701
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003702What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003703===========================
3704
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3706
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003707Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003708--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003709
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003710- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3711 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003712
3713 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003714 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003715
3716 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3717 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003718 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003719 This needs to be documented.
3720
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003721- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3722 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3723
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003724- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3725 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3726 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3727
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003728- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3729 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3730
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003731- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3732 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3733 class forbids it).
3734
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003735- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3736 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3737 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3738
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003739- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3740
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003741Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003743
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003744- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3745 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003746 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003747
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003748- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3749 (like 1 + '').
3750
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003751Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003753
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003754- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3755 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3756 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3757 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003758 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003759 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3760
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003761- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3762 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3763 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3764 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3765
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003766- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3767 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003768 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3769 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3770 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003771
3772- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3773 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003774
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003775- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3776 bytes on its input.
3777
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003778Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003780
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003781- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003782 convenience function.
3783
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003784- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3785 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3786 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003787 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3788 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3789 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3790 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3791 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3792 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003793
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003794- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3795 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3796 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3797 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3798
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003799- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3800 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3801 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3802
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003803- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3804 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3805 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3806 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3807
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003808- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3809 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003810 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003811 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3812 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3813 new -l and -e options.
3814
3815- statcache is now deprecated.
3816
3817- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3818 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003819 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003820 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3821 time properly taken into account.
3822
3823- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3824 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3825 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3826 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3827
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003828Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003829-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003830
3831Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003832-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003833
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003834- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3835 is built with libdb3 if available.
3836
3837- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3838
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003839C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003841
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003842- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3843 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3844 PySequence_Size().
3845
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003846- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3847
3848- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3849 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3850 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3851
3852- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3853 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3854
3855- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3856 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3857
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003858New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003860
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003861- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3862 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3863
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003864- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3865 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3866
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003867- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3868
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003869Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003870-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003871
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003872- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3873 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3874
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003875Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003877
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003878Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003880
3881- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3882 removed completely in the next release.
3883
3884- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3885 OSX.
3886
3887- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3888 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3889
3890- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3891
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003892
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003893What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003894===========================
3895
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003896*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3897
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003898Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003900
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003901- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003902 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003903 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003904 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3905 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003906 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3907 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003908 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3909 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003910
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003911- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3912 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3913
3914- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3915 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3916
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003917Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003919
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003920- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3921 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3922 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3923 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3924 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3925 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3926 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3927 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3928
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003929- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3930 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3931 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3932 example).
3933
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003934- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003935 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003936 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003937 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003938
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003939- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3940 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3941 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003942 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003943
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003944- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3945 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3946 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3947 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3948 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3949 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3950
3951 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3952
3953 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3954
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003955Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003957
3958- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3959
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003960- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3961
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003962- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3963 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003964
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003965- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3966 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3967 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3968 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3969 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3970 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003971 attributes.
3972
3973- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3974 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3975 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003976
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003977- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3978 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3979 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003980
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003981- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3982 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3983 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003984 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3985 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3986
3987- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3988 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003989
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003990Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003992
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003993- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3994 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3995
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003996- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3997 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3998 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3999 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4000
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004001- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4002 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4003 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4004 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4005
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004006 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4007 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4008 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4009 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4010 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4011 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4012 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4013 without losing information).
4014
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004015- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004016 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4017 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4018 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4019 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4020 module).
4021
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004022 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004023 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4024 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4025 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4026 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004027
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004028- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004029 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4030 encoding.
4031
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004032- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4033 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4034
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004036 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4037
4038- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4039 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4040 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4041 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4042
4043- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4044
4045- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4046 ON, and OFF.
4047
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004048- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4049 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4050
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004051Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004053
4054- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4055 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4056 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004057
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004058- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4059 been added: -X and -E.
4060
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004061Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004063
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004064- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4065 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4066
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004067C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004068-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004069
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004070- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4071 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4072 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4073 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4074 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4075
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004076- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4077 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4078 as long) arguments.
4079
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004080- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4081 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4082 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4083 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4084 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4085 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4086
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004087- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4088 input.
4089
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004090New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004092
4093Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004095
4096Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004098
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004099- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4100 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4101 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4102
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004103- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4104 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4105 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004106 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004107
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004108 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4109 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4110 import signal
4111 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004112
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004114 while 1:
4115 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004117 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4118 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4119 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4120 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004121
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004122
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004123What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4124===========================
4125
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4127
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004128Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004130
4131- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4132 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4133 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4134
4135- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4136 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4137 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4138 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4139 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4140 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4141 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004142
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004143- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004144 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004145 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4146 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4147 associate a docstring with a property.
4148
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004149- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4150 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4151 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4152 other built-in object types.
4153
4154- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4155 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4156 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4157 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4158 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4159
4160- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4161 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4162
4163- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4164 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004165 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004166 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4167 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4168 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4169 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4170 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4171
4172- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4173 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4174 class.
4175
4176- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4177 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4178 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4179 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4180
4181- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4182 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4183 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4184 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4185
4186- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4187 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4188
4189- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4190 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4191 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4192 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4193 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004194 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004195 with the same value as s.
4196
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004197- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4198
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004199Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004201
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004202- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4203
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004204- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4205 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4206 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4207 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4208 objects.
4209
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004210- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4211 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004212 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4213 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4214
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004215- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4216 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4217 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4218
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004219Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004221
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004222- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4223 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4224 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4225 by the instances.
4226
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004227- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4228 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4229 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4230
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004231- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4232 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4233 before the entire comparison is complete.
4234
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004235- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4236 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4237 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4238
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004239- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4240 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4241 getwriter().
4242
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004243- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4244 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4245
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004246- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004247 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4248 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4249
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004250- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4251 iterable object.
4252
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004253- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4254 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004255
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004256- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4257 authentication.
4258
4259- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4260 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004261
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004262- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004263 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4264 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4265 a sample driver.)
4266
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004267Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004269
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004270- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4271 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4272 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4273 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4274 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4275 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4276 kernel has large file support.
4277
4278- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4279 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4280 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4281 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4282 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4283
4284- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4285 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4286 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4287
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004288C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004290
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004291- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4292 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4293
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004294New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004295-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004296
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004297- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4298 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4299
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004300Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004301-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004302
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004303- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4304 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4305 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4306 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4307 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4308
4309- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4310 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4311 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4312 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4313
4314- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4315 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4316
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004317Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004319
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004320- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004321 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4322 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004323
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004324
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004325What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4326===========================
4327
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4329
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004330Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004331----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004332
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004333- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4334 big to represent as a C double.
4335
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004336- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4337 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4338 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4339 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4340 restriction).
4341
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004342- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4343 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4344 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4345 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4346 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4347
4348 >>> dir([])
4349 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4350 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4351 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4352 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4353 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4354 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4355 'reverse', 'sort']
4356
4357 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4358
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004359- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004360 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4361 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4362 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4363 OverflowError exception.
4364
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004365- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004366 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004367 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4368 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4369 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4370 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4371 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004372 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4374 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4375
4376 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4377 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4378 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4379 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004380
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004381- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004382 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4383 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4384 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4385 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4386 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4387 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4388 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4389 once it is created.
4390
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004391- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4392 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4393 (key, value) pairs.
4394
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004395- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004396 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4397 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4398
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004399- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4400 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4401 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4402 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4403 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004404
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004405- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004406 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4407 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4408
4409 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4410
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004411- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004412 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4413
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004414Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004415-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004416
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004417- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004418 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4419 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004420
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004421- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4422 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4423 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4424 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4425 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4426 in this area anymore).
4427
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004428- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4429 threading.Timer.
4430
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004431- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4432 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4433
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004434- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004435 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4436
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004437- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004438 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4439 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4440 converted to Python longs.
4441
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004442- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004443 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4444
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004445- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4446 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4447 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4448
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004449Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004451
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004452- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4453 division operators as per PEP 238.
4454
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004455Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004457
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004458- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4459 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4460 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4461 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4462
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004463C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004464-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004465
4466- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004467
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004468- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4469 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004470 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004471
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4473 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004474 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004475 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004476
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004477- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004478 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4479 module:
4480
4481 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004482
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004483 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4484 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004485
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004486 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4487 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004488
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004489 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4490
4491 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4492
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004493- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004494 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4495 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4496 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004497
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004498New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004500
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004501- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4502 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4503 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4504 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4505 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004506
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004507Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004509
4510Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004512
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004513- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4514 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4515 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4516 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004517 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4518 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4519 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4520 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4521 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004522
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004523- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004524 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4525
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004526
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004527What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4528===========================
4529
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004530*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4531
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004532Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004533-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004534
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004535- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4536 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4537
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004538- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4539 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4540 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004541
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004542- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4543 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4544 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4545 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004546
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004547- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4548
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004550
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004551Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004553
4554- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004555 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004556 the module docstring for details.
4557
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004558Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004560
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004561- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004562 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4563 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4564 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004565
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004566- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4567 Nick Mathewson.
4568
4569Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004571
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004572- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4573 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4574 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4575 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4576 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4577 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4578 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4579 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4580
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004581- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4582 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4583 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4584 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4585
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004586- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4587 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4588 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4589 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4590 come a long way).
4591
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004592- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4593 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4594 write filters for these warnings).
4595
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004596- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4597 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4598 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4599 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4600 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4601
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004602- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4603 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4604 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4605 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4606 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4607 older distribution.
4608
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004609Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004611
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004612- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4613 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004614 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004615
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004616- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4617 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4618 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4619
4620- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4621
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004622- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4623
4624- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4625
4626- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4627
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004629
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004630- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4631
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004632New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004633-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004634
4635C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004636-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004637
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004638- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4639 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4640 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4641 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4642 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4643 against buffer overruns.
4644
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004645- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004646 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4647 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004648 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4649 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4650 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4651
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004652- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4653 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4654 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4655 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4656 deprecated.
4657
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004658Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004659-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004660
4661- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4662 relevant is found.
4663
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004664
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004665What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004666===========================
4667
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4669
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004670Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004671----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004672
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004673- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4674 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4675 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4676 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4677 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4678 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4679 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4680 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004681 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004682 repaired.
4683
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004684- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004685 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004686 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4687 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4688 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4689 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4690 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4691 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4692 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4693 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4694
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004695- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4696 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4697 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4698 leading BMO character).
4699
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004700- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4701 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4702 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4703
4704 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4705 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4706 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004707
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004708 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4709 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4710 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4711 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4712 for various simple to use conversions.
4713
4714 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4715 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4716
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004717 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4718 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4719 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4720 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4721 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4722 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4723 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4724 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4725 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4726 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4727 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4728 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4729 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4730 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4731 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004732
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004733- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4734 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4735 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004736 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004737 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004738
4739 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004740 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4741 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4742 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4743 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4744 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004745 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4746 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004747
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004748 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4749 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4750 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004751 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004752
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004753- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4754 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4755 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4756 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4757 floating arithmetic,
4758
4759 x = 9007199254740992.0
4760 print long(x)
4761
4762 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4763 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4764 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4765 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4766 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4767 functions are of good quality).
4768
4769 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4770 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4771 algorithms to break.
4772
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004773- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4774 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4775 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4776 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4777 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4778 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4779 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4780 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4781 order.
4782
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004783- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4784 operation along the most common code paths.
4785
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004786- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4787 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4788
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004789- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4790 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4791 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4792 {}.update(UserDict())
4793
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004794- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4795 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4796 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4797 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4798 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4799 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4800 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4801 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4802
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004803- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004804 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004806 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004807 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4808 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004809 join() method of strings
4810 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004811 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4812 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004814 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004815
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004816- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4817 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4818
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004819- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4820 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4821
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004822- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4823 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4824 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4825 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4826
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004827- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4828 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004829 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004830 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4831 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004832
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004833- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4834
4835
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004836Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004837-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004838
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004839- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004840 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004841 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4842 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4843
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004844- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4845 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4846
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004847- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4848 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4849 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4850 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4851
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004852- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4853 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4854 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4855
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004856- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4857
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004858- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4859
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004860- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4861 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4862 that are still imported into string.py).
4863
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004864- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4865
4866- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4867 Now it does.
4868
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004869- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4870
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004871- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4872 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4873 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4874 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4875 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004876 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4877 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004878
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004879- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4880 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4881 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4882 'help(object)'.
4883
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004884Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004886
4887- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004888 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004889 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4890 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4891
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004892- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004893 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4894 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004895
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004896C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004897-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004898
4899- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4900 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901
4902----
4903
4904**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**