blob: 15713e945b70a71acc339984195619913ba794a8 [file] [log] [blame]
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
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000015- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
16 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
17 @staticmethod
18 def foo(bar):
19 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect this XXX before 2.4a2)
20
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000021- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
22 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
23 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
24 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
25 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
26 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
27 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
28 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
29 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
30 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
31 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
32
33 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
34 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
35 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
36 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
37 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
38 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
39 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
40
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000041- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
42 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
43
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000044- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000045 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000046
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000047- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000048 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000049 which was missing for no apparent reason.
50
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000051- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000052 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
53 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
54
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000055- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
56 types that support garbage collection.
57
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000058- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
59
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000060- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
61 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
62 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
63 Jython.
64
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000065- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
66
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000067Extension modules
68-----------------
69
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000070- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
71
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000072Library
73-------
74
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000075- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
76
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000077- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
78 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
79 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
80
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000081- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
82
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000083- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
84 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
85
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000086- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
87 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
88 when dummy_threading is being used.
89
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000090- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
91 from a tarfile.
92
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000093- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000094 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000095
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000096- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
97 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
98 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
99 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
100
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000101- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
102 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
103
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000104- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
105 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
106 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
107 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
108 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
109 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
110 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
111 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
112 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
113 by some other method in progress).
114
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000115- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
116 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
117 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000118
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000119- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
120
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000121- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
122 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
123 AM Kuchling.
124
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000125- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
126 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
127 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
128
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000129- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
130 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
131 instead of unsigned.
132
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000133- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000134 no longer part of the public API.
135
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000136- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
137 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
138 string methods of the same name).
139
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000140- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
141 SF patch 982681.
142
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000143- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000144 SF patch 945642.
145
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000146- doctest unittest integration improvements:
147
148 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
149
150 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
151 DocTestSuites.
152
153- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
154 that provide thread-local data.
155
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000156- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
157 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
158
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000159- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
160
161- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
162 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
163 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
164
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000165- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
166
167 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
168 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
169 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000170
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000171 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
172 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
173 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
174 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
175
176 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
177 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
178
179 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
180 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
181 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
182 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
183
184 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
185 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
186 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
187 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
188 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
189
190 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
191 wrapping help output.
192
193 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
194 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
195 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000196
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000197Tools/Demos
198-----------
199
200Build
201-----
202
203C API
204-----
205
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000206- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
207 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
208 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
209 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
210 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
211 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
212 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
213 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
214 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
215 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
216 its visible semantics have not changed.
217
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000218- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
219 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
220
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000221Documentation
222-------------
223
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000224- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000225
226 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
227 assigning thier values
228
229 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
230
231 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
232
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000233- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000234
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000235New platforms
236-------------
237
238Tests
239-----
240
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000241- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000242 platforms that use the Makefile.
243
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000244- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
245 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
246 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
247
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000248Windows
249-------
250
251Mac
252---
253
254
255
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000256What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
257=================================
258
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000259*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000260
261Core and builtins
262-----------------
263
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000264- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
265 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
266 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
267 objects now (one object instead of three).
268
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000269- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
270 Windows DLLs.
271
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000272- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
273
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000274- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
275 a new .pyc magic.
276
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000277- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
278 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
279 be there.
280
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000281- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
282 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
283 the LC_NUMERIC category.
284
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000285- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
286 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
287 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
288
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000289- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
290
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000291- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
292 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
293 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000294
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000295- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
296 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
297
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000298- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
299
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000300- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000301 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000302
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000303- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
304
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000305- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
306
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000307- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
308 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
309
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000310- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
311 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
312 Fixes bug #858016 .
313
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000314- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
315 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
316 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
317
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000318- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
319 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
320 improves their performance (about 35%).
321
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000322- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
323 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
324 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
325
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000326- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
327 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
328 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
329 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
330
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000331- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
332 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
333 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
334 length is not known).
335
336- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
337 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000338 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
339 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000340 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
341
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000342- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
343 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
344
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000345- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
346 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
347 keyword arguments.
348
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000349- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
350 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
351 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
352
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000353- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
354 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
355 cases.
356
357- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
358 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
359 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
360 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
361 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
362 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
363 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
364 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
365 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
366 a release build.
367
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000368- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
369 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
370
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000371- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000372 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000373
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000374- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
375 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
376 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
377 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
378 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
379 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
380 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
381 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
382 destroyed.
383
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000384- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
385 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
386 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
387 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
388 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
389 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
390 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
391 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
392
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000393- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
394 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
395 character other than a space.
396
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000397- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
398 by the function object or by the method object, the function
399 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
400 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
401 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
402 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
403 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
404 attributes with the same name.
405
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000406- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
407 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
408 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
409 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
410 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
411 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
412 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
413 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
414 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
415 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
416 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
417 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
418 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
419 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000420
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000421- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
422 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
423 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
424 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
425 This has been repaired.
426
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000427- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
428
429- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
430
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000431- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
432 over a sequence.
433
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000434- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000435 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000436
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000437- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
438
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000439- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
440 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
441 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
442 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
443 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
444 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
445 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
446 records with equal keys is unchanged).
447
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000448- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
449 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
450 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
451
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000452- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
453 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
454 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
455 freelist.
456
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000457- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
458 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
459
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000460- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
461 number.
462
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000463- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
464 a TypeError exception.
465
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000466- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
467 820195.
468
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000469- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
470 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
471 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
472
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000473- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000474 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
475 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000476
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000477- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
478 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
479 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
480
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000481- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
482 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000483 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000484
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000485- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000486 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
487 the first call.
488
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000489
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000490Extension modules
491-----------------
492
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000493- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
494 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
495
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000496- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
497 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
498 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
499 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
500 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
501 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
502 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000503
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000504- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
505
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000506- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
507
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000508- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
509 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
510
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000511- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
512 fewer false positives.
513
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000514- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
515 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
516
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000517- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000518 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
519
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000520- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000521 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000522 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
523 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
524 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000525
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000526- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
527 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
528 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
529 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
530
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000531- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
532 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
533 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
534 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
535 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
536 #897625.
537
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000538- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
539 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
540
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000541- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
542 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
543 and pops on either side of the deque.
544
545- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
546 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
547
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000548- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
549 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
550 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
551 other functions that expect a function argument.
552
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000553- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
554
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000555- os.getsid was added.
556
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000557- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
558 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
559 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
560
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000561- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
562
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000563- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
564
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000565- readline.clear_history was added.
566
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000567- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
568
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000569- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
570
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000571- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
572
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000573- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
574
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000575- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
576
577- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
578
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000579- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
580
581- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
582
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000583- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
584 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
585 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
586
587- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
588 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
589 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
590 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
591 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
592 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
593 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
594
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000595- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
596 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
597 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
598 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000599
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000600- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000601 iterators from a single iterable.
602
603- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
604 of raising a TypeError exception.
605
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000606- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
607 as parameter.
608
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000609Library
610-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000611
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000612- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
613 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
614 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000615
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000616- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
617 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
618 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000619
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000620- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000621
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000622- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
623 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000624
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000625- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
626 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
627
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000628- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
629
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000630- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000631 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000632
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000633- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
634 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
635
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000636- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
637
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000638- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
639 on cygwin and mingw32.
640
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000641- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
642
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000643- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
644 module.
645
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000646- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
647 installation scheme for all platforms.
648
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000649- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000650 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000651
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000652- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
653 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
654 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
655
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000656- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
657 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
658 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
659
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000660- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
661
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000662- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
663
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000664- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
665 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
666
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000667- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
668 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
669 type pattern with the same value exists.
670
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000671- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
672 when run from the command prompt).
673
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000674- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
675 not taken into consideration when caching value.
676
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000677- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
678 default sort).
679
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000680- Added global runctx function to profile module
681
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000682- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
683
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000684- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
685
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000686- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
687
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000688- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000689 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
690 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
691 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
692 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
693 accordingly.
694
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000695- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
696 decoding standards.
697
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000698- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
699 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
700 called for all requests.
701
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000702- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
703 they are passed to the compiler.
704
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000705- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
706 indent, width and depth.
707
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000708- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
709 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
710
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000711- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
712 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
713
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000714- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
715
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000716- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
717
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000718- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
719
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000720- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
721 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
722
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000723- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000724 for better performance.
725
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000726- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000727
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000728- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
729 a string).
730
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000731- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
732
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000733- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
734
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000735- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
736
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000737- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
738
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000739- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
740 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
741 list of fieldnames.
742
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000743- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
744 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
745
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000746- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
747
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000748- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
749 empty lists.
750
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000751- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
752 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
753 and shelves.
754
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000755- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
756 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
757
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000758- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000759 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
760 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000761
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000762- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
763 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000764 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000765
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000766- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000767 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
768 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
769
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000770- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
771 and removed in Py2.4.
772
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000773- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
774
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000775- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
776
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000777Tools/Demos
778-----------
779
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000780- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
781 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
782
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000783- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
784
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000785- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
786 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
787 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
788 destination in situations where both files are given.
789
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000790- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
791 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
792 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
793 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
794
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000795- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
796
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000797- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
798 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
799 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
800 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
801 now.
802
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000803- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
804 in effect
805
806- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
807 C-c C-h
808
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000809- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
810 -d option was given.
811
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000812Build
813-----
814
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000815- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
816 build under OS X.
817
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000818- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
819 --enable-profiling.
820
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000821- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
822 is configured --with-tsc.
823
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000824- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
825 on AMD64.
826
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000827- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
828 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
829
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000830- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
831 removed.
832
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000833- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
834 supported (see PEP 11).
835
836- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
837
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000838- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
839
840- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
841 (see PEP 11).
842
843- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
844 sizeof(char) must be 1.
845
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000846C API
847-----
848
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000849- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
850 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
851 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
852
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000853- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
854 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
855 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
856 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
857
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000858- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
859 generator objects.
860
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000861- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
862 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000863 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
864 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000865
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000866- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
867 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
868
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000869- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
870 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
871 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
872 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
873 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
874
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000875- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
876 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
877 about 10% faster.
878
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000879- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
880 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
881
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000882- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
883 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
884 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
885 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
886
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000887Windows
888-------
889
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000890- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
891 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
892 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
893 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
894
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000895- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
896 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
897 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
898
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000899
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000900What's New in Python 2.3 final?
901===============================
902
903*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
904
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000905IDLE
906----
907
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000908- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
909 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
910 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
911 context-menu actions.
912
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000913- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
914 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
915 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
916 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
917 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
918 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
919 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
920 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
921 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
922
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000923
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000924What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
925=============================================
926
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000927*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000928
929Core and builtins
930-----------------
931
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000932- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000933 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000934 comment at the end are still unsupported.
935
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000936Extension modules
937-----------------
938
939- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
940 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
941 than once. This has been fixed.
942
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000943- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
944 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
945 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
946 call.
947
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000948- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
949
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000950Library
951-------
952
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000953- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
954 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
955
956- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
957 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
958 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
959 restored.
960
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000961IDLE
962----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000963
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000964- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000965
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000966Build
967-----
968
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000969- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
970 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
971
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000972C API
973-----
974
975Windows
976-------
977
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000978- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
979 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
980
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000981- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
982
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000983Mac
984---
985
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000986- Various fixes to pimp.
987
988- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
989
990- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
991 more problems than it solves.
992
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000993
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000994What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
995=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000996
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000997*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
998
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000999Core and builtins
1000-----------------
1001
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001002- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1003 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1004
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001005- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1006 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001007 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001008
1009- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1010 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1011 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001012 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001013
1014- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1015 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001016
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001017- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1018 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1019 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1020
1021- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001022 770247.
1023
1024- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001025
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001026Extension modules
1027-----------------
1028
1029- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1030 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1031
1032- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1033
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001034- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1035
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001036- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1037 contained within the _strptime module.
1038
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001039- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1040 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1041
1042- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001043 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1044
1045- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1046 the find_class attribute, if present.
1047
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001048- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001049
1050 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1051 (SF bug 763298).
1052
1053 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001054 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1055 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1056 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001057
1058 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1059
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001060Library
1061-------
1062
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001063- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1064
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001065- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1066 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1067 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1068 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1069 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1070 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1071 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1072 or Tester().
1073
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001074- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1075 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1076 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1077 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1078 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1079 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1080 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1081 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1082 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001083
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001084 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001085
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001086- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1087 weren't before was an oversight.
1088
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001089- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1090 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1091
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001092- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1093 when there are no lines.
1094
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001095- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1096 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1097
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001098- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1099 to child processes.
1100
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001101- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1102
1103- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1104
1105- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1106 xmlrpclib.
1107
1108- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1109 responses.
1110
1111- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1112 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1113
1114- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1115 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1116 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1117
1118- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1119 used as patterns.
1120
1121- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1122 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1123 than Tk 8.3.
1124
1125- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1126
1127- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001128
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001129Tools/Demos
1130-----------
1131
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001132- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1133
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001134- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1135
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001136- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001137
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001138Build
1139-----
1140
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001141- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1142
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001143- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1144
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001145- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1146 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001147
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001148- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1149 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1150 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001151
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001152C API
1153-----
1154
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001155- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1156 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1157
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001158Windows
1159-------
1160
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001161- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1162 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1163 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1164 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1165 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1166 Python exception ::
1167
1168 thread.error: can't start new thread
1169
1170 is raised now.
1171
1172- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1173 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1174 instead of from DLL teardown.
1175
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001176Mac
1177---
1178
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001179- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001180 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001181 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1182 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1183 the executable in the bundle.
1184
1185- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001186
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001187- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1188
1189- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1190 on Panther.
1191
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001192What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1193================================
1194
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001195*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001196
1197Core and builtins
1198-----------------
1199
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001200- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1201 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1202 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1203 with the -i option.
1204
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001205- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1206 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1207
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001208- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1209 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1210
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001211- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1212 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1213 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1214 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1215 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1216 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1217 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1218 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1219 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1220 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1221 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1222 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1223 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001224
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001225- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1226 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1227 embedded in a lambda expression.
1228
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001229- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1230 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1231 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1232 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1233 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1234
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001235- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1236 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1237 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1238
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001239- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1240 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1241
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001242- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1243 It's writable again.
1244
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001245- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1246 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1247 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001248 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001249
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001250- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1251 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1252 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1253
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001254Extension modules
1255-----------------
1256
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001257- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1258 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1259
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001260- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1261 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1262 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1263 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1264
1265- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1266 collection.
1267
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001268- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1269 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1270 unique within a single program run.
1271
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001272- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1273 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1274
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001275- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1276 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1277
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001278- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1279 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001280
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001281- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1282
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001283- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1284 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1285
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001286- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1287 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1288 for many BSD-derived systems.
1289
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001290
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001291Library
1292-------
1293
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001294- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1295 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1296 primary ones:
1297
1298 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1299 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1300 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1301
1302 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1303 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1304 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1305 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1306 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1307 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1308
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001309- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1310 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1311 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1312 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1313 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1314 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1315 argument.
1316
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001317- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1318 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1319 in the archive.
1320
1321- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1322 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1323
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001324- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1325 569574).
1326
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001327- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1328 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1329 no more.
1330
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001331- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1332 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1333 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1334 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1335 code coverage.
1336
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001337- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1338 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1339 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001340 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1341 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001342
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001343- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1344 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1345 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001346 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001347
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001348- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1349
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001350- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1351 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1352 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1353 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1354
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001355- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1356 handling.
1357
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001358- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1359 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1360
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001361- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1362 in socket.py.
1363
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001364- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1365
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001366- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1367 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1368 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1369 opener with proxy support.
1370
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001371- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1372
1373- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1374
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001375Tools/Demos
1376-----------
1377
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001378- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1379
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001380- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1381
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001382- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1383 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001384
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001385- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1386 files.
1387
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001388Build
1389-----
1390
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001391- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001392 different root directory.
1393
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001394C API
1395-----
1396
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001397- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1398 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1399 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1400 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1401 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1402 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1403 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1404 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1405 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1406 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1407
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001408- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1409 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1410 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1411 from Python.
1412
1413
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001414New platforms
1415-------------
1416
1417None this time.
1418
1419Tests
1420-----
1421
1422- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1423 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1424
1425Windows
1426-------
1427
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001428- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1429
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001430- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1431 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1432 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1433 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1434 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1435 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1436 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1437 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1438 that's what it's for.
1439
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001440Mac
1441---
1442
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001443- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1444 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1445 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1446 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001447- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1448 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1449- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001450
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001451SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1452------------------------------------
1453
1454430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1455598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1456622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1457661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1458683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1459697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1460713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1461724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1462727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1463729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1464730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1465731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1466732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1467733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1468735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1469740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1470744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1471745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1472747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1473749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1474751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1475753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1476755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1477757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1478760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1479
1480
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001481What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1482================================
1483
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001484*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001485
1486Core and builtins
1487-----------------
1488
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001489- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1490 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1491
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001492- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1493 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1494 and cannot be strings).
1495
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001496- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1497 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1498 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1499 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1500
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001501- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1502 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1503 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1504 Python itself.
1505
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001506- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1507 the referenced object, if it has one.
1508
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001509- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1510 the thread started at
1511 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1512
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001513- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1514 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1515 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1516 placed on a list index.
1517
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001518- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1519 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1520 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1521 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1522
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001523- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1524 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1525 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1526 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1527 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1528 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1529 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1530
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001531- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1532 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1533 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1534 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1535 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1536
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001537- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1538 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001539
1540- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1541 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1542 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1543 #693195.)
1544
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001545- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1546 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001547
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001548- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001549 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001550 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1551 interpreter executions, would fail.
1552
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001553- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001554 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001555 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001556
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001557Extension modules
1558-----------------
1559
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001560- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1561 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1562 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1563 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1564
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001565- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1566 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1567
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001568- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1569 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1570 and Greg Chapman.)
1571
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001572- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1573 recursively.
1574
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001575- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001576 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1577 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1578 leaks.
1579
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001580- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1581
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001582- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1583 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1584 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1585 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1586 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1587 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1588 #705836.
1589
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001590- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001591 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1592
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001593- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1594 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1595 See SF bug #692416.
1596
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001597- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1598 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1599
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001600- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1601 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1602 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001603
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001604- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001605 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1606 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1607
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001608- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1609 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1610 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1611 timeouts to work properly.
1612
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001613Library
1614-------
1615
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001616- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1617 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1618 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1619 future release.
1620
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001621- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1622 for querying platform dependent features.
1623
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001624- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001625
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001626- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1627 pickle protocol versions.
1628
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001629- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1630 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1631 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1632
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001633- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1634
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001635- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1636 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1637 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1638 modules.
1639
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001640- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1641 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1642 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1643
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001644- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1645 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1646
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001647- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1648 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1649 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1650
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001651- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001652 MS Office extensions.
1653
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001654- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1655 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1656
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001657- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1658 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1659
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001660- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1661 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1662 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1663 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1664 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1665 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1666
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001667- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1668 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1669 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001670
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001671- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1672 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1673 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1674
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001675- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1676
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001677- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1678 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1679 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1680
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001681Tools/Demos
1682-----------
1683
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001684- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1685 See the module docstring for details.
1686
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001687Build
1688-----
1689
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001690- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1691 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001692
1693C API
1694-----
1695
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001696- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1697
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001698- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1699 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1700 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1701
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001702- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1703 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001704
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001705 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1706 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1707 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001708
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001709- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001710 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1711
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001712- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1713 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1714 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001715
1716New platforms
1717-------------
1718
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001719None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001720
1721Tests
1722-----
1723
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001724- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1725 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001726
1727Windows
1728-------
1729
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001730- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1731 function.
1732
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001733- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1734 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001735
1736Mac
1737---
1738
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001739- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1740 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001741
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001742- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1743 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001744
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001745- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1746 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1747 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001748
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001749- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001750 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1751 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001752
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001753- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1754 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001755
1756
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001757What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1758=================================
1759
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001760*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001761
1762Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001763-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001764
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001765- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1766 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1767 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1768
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001769- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1770 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1771 (SF patch #664376.)
1772
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001773- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1774 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1775 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1776 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1777 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1778 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001779 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001780
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001781- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1782 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1783 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1784 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001785 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001786
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001787- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1788 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1789 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1790 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1791 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1792 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1793 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1794 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1795 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1796 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1797 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1798
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001799- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1800 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1801 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1802 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1803 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1804 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1805
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001806- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1807 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1808
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001809- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1810 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1811 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1812 case.)
1813
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001814- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1815 passed as unicode strings.
1816
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001817- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1818 See SF bug #683467.
1819
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001820- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1821 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1822
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001823- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1824
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001825- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1826
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001827- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1828 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1829 arguments.
1830
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001831- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1832 See SF bug #667147.
1833
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001834- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001835 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001836 See SF bug #676155.
1837
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001838- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001839 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001840 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1841 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1842 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1843 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1844 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1845 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001846
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001847Extension modules
1848-----------------
1849
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001850- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1851 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1852 tp_as_number pointer.
1853
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001854- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1855 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1856 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1857 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1858 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1859
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001860- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1861
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001862- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1863
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001864- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001865 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001866 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1867 patch #678531.)
1868
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001869- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1870 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1871
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001872- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1873 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1874
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001875- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1876
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001877- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1878 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1879 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1880
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001881- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1882
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001883- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1884 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1885
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001886- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001887
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001888- datetime changes:
1889
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001890 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1891
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001892 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1893 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1894 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1895 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1896 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1897 now.
1898
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001899 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001900 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1901 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001902
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001903 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001904 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001905 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1906 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1907 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1908 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001909
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001910 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1911 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1912 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001913 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1914
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001915 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1916 by a later example coded by Guido.
1917
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001918 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001919 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1920 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1921 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001922 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1923 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1924
1925 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1926 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1927 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1928 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1929 tzinfo subclass instance.
1930
1931 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1932 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1933 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1934 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1935 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1936 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1937 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1938 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001939
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001940 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1941 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1942 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1943 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1944 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001945 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1946
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001947 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001948
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001949 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1950 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1951 as a naive datetime object.
1952
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001953 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1954 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1955 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1956
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001957 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1958 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1959 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1960 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1961 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1962 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1963 comparison.
1964
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001965 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1966 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1967 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1968 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001969 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001970
1971 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001972
1973 and ::
1974
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001975 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1976
1977 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1978 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1979 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1980 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1981
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001982 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1983 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1984 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1985 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1986 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1987
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001988 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1989 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001990 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1991 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001992
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001993Library
1994-------
1995
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001996- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1997 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1998
1999- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2000 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2001 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2002 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2003 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2004 See PEP 307 for details.
2005
2006- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2007 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2008
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002009- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2010 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002011 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002012 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2013 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002014 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002015
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002016- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2017 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2018
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002019- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2020 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2021 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2022
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002023- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2024
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002025- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2026 exception.
2027
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002028- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2029 class.
2030
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002031- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2032 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2033 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2034
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002035- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2036 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2037
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002038- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002039 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2040 See SF bug #659228.
2041
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002042- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2043 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2044 See SF patch #651082.
2045
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002046- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002047
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002048- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2049 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2050
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002051- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002052 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002053
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002054- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2055 DOS paths from other platforms.
2056
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002057Tools/Demos
2058-----------
2059
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002060- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2061 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2062 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2063 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2064 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2065 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2066 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2067 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2068 example:
2069
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002070 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2071 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002072
2073 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2074
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002075
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002076Build
2077-----
2078
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002079- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2080 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2081 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002082 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2083
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002084 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2085
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002086- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2087 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2088 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2089 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2090 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2091 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2092 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2093 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2094 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2095
2096- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2097 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2098 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2099 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2100
2101- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2102 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2103
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002104C API
2105-----
2106
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002107- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2108 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002109
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002110- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2111 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2112 tp_as_number pointer.
2113
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002114- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2115 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2116 (SF #681367)
2117
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002118- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2119 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2120 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2121 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002122
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002123Tests
2124-----
2125
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002126- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002127 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2128 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2129 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2130 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2131 pydoc.)
2132
2133- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2134
2135- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002136
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002137Windows
2138-------
2139
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002140- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2141 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2142 time).
2143
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002144- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2145 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2146
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002147- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2148 release without strong cryptography.
2149
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002150- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002151 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002152
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002153- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2154 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2155
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002156Mac
2157---
2158
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002159- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2160 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002161
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002162- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2163 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2164 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002165
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002166- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2167 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002168
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002169- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2170 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2171 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2172 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002173
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002174- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002175 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2176 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2177 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002178
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002179
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002180What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002181=================================
2182
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002183*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002184
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002185Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002186--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002187
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002188- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2189
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002190- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2191 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002192 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002193 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002194 a different meaning than before.
2195
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002196- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002197 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002198 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002199
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002200- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002201 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002202 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002203
2204- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2205 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2206 and deallocation.
2207
2208- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2209 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2210
2211- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2212 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2213 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2214 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2215 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2216
2217- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2218 now detected by the garbage collector.
2219
2220- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2221 [SF bug 519621]
2222
2223- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2224 identifier.
2225
2226- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2227 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2228 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2229 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2230 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2231 [SF bug 563060]
2232
2233- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2234 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2235 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2236 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2237 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2238
2239- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2240 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2241 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2242
2243- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2244
2245- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2246 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2247 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2248 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2249 state of the slots would be lost.)
2250
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002251Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002252-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002253
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002254- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002255 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2256 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2257 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2258 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002259 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2260 Jython 2.1.
2261
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002262- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002263 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002264 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2265 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2266 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2267 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2268 these, see PEP 302.
2269
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002270- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2271 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2272 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2273
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002274- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2275 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2276 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2277
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002278- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2279 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2280 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2281
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002282- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2283 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2284 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2285 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2286 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2287 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2288 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2289 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2290 releases or implementations.
2291
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002292- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002293 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2294 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002295
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002296- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2297 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2298
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002299- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2300 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2301 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2302
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002303- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2304 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2305
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002306- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2307 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002308 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2309 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002310
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002311- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2312 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2313 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2314 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2315 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2316
2317 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2318 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2319 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2320 pattern.
2321
2322 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2323 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2324 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2325 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2326
2327 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2328 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2329 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2330 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2331 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2332 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2333
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002334- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2335 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2336 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2337 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2338 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2339 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2340 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2341 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002342
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002343- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2344 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2345 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2346 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2347 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002348 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2349 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2350 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2351 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2352 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2353 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2354 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002355
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002356- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2357 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2358
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002359- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2360 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2361 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2362 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2363 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2364 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2365 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2366 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2367 to Zack Weinberg!
2368
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002369- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2370 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2371 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2372 type. This has been fixed now.
2373
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002374- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2375 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2376 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2377
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002378- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2379 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2380 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2381 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2382 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2383 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2384 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2385 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002386 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002387
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002388- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2389 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2390 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002391
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002392- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2393 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2394 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2395 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2396 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2397 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2398 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2399 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002400 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002401 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2402 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2403
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002404- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2405 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2406 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2407 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2408 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2409 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2410 this.)
2411
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002412- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2413 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002414 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002415 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002416 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2417 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002418 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2419 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002420
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002421- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2422 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2423 currently running.
2424
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002425- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2426 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2427 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2428 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2429
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002430- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2431 as directory names.
2432
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002433- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2434 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2435
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002436- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2437 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2438
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002439- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002440 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2441 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002442
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002443- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2444 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2445 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2446 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2447 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2448
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002449- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2450 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2451 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2452 removed.
2453
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002454- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2455 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2456 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2457
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002458- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2459 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2460 to __debug__.
2461
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002462- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2463 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2464 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2465
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002466- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2467 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2468 deprecated now.
2469
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002470- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2471 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2472 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002473
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002474- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2475 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2476 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2477 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2478 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002479
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002480- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2481 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2482
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002483- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2484 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2485 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002486 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002487 is backward compatible.
2488
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002489- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2490 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2491 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2492 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2493 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2494
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002495- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2496 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2497 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2498 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2499 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2500 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002501
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002502- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2503 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2504
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002505- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2506 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2507
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002508- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2509 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2510 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2511 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2512 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2513
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002514- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2515 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2516 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2517
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002518- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002519 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2520
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002521- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2522 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2523 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002524
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002525- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2526 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2527
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002528- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2529 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2530 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2531
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002532- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2533
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002534Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002536
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002537- Added three operators to the operator module:
2538 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2539 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2540 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2541
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002542- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2543
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002544- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2545 archives.
2546
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002547- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2548 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2549 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2550
2551 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2552
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002553- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2554 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2555 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002556 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002557
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002558- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2559 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2560 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2561 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002562 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2563 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2564 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2565 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002566
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002567- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2568 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002569
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002570- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2571
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002572- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2573 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2574
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002575- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2576 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2577 supported.
2578
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002579- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2580
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002581- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2582 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002583
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002584- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2585 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2586
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002587- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2588
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002589- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2590 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2591
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002592- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2593 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2594 functions but callable type objects.
2595
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002596- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002597 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002598 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002599
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002600- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2601 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002602
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002603- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2604 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002605
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002606- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2607 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2608 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2609 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2610
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002611- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2612 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002613
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002614- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2615 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2616 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2617 and __imul__.
2618
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002619- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002620 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2621 is called.
2622
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002623- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2624 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2625 interpreter was compiled.
2626
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002627- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2628 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2629 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002630 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002631 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2632 1, not 2.
2633
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002634- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2635 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2636 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2637 limit.
2638
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002639- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2640 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2641 bug #623464.
2642
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002643- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2644 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2645 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2646 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2647
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002648Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002649-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002650
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002651- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2652
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002653- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2654 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2655 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2656 with Python 2.3a2.
2657
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002658- os.path exposes getctime.
2659
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002660- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002661 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002662 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002663 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002664 unit tests of floating point results.
2665
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002666- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2667 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2668 has been increased.
2669
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002670- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2671 executed.
2672
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002673- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2674 postinstallation script.
2675
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002676- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2677 test the current module.
2678
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002679- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002680 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2681 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2682 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2683 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2684
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002685- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002686 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002687 Ward's Optik package.
2688
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002689- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2690 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2691 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2692 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2693
2694- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2695 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002696 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002697
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002698- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2699 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2700 shelf are binary pickles.
2701
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002702- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2703 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2704
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002705- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2706 modules are iterators now.
2707
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002708- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2709 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2710 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2711 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2712 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2713 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002714
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002715- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2716 with their entity value.
2717
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002718- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2719
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002720- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2721 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002722
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002723- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2724 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002725 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002726
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002727- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2728 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2729 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2730 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2731 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2732 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2733 main():
2734
2735 import locale
2736 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2737
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002738- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2739 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2740
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002741- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2742 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2743 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2744 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2745 to the new standard.
2746
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002747- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2748 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2749 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2750 an extension to the database.
2751
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002752- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2753 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2754 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2755 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002756 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002757
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002758- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002759 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002760
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002761- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2762 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2763 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2764 bounded integers.
2765
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002766- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2767 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2768 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2769 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2770 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2771 in existence.
2772
2773 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2774 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2775 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2776 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2777 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2778 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2779
2780 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2781 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2782 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2783 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2784
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002785- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2786 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2787 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2788
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002789- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2790
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002791- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2792 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2793 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2794 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2795
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002796- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2797 argument.
2798
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002799- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2800 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2801 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2802 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2803 [SF patch 560794].
2804
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002805- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2806 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2807 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002808 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2809 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2810 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002811
2812- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2813 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002814
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002815- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2816 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2817 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2818 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002819
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002820- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2821 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2822 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2823 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2824 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2825
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002826- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002827
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002828- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2829
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002830- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2831 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2832 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2833 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2834 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2835 identical to None.
2836
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002837- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2838 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2839 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2840 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2841 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2842 results now.
2843
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002844- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2845 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2846
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002847- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2848 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2849 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2850 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2851 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2852 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2853 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2854 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2855
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002856- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2857
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002858- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2859 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2860
2861- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2862 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2863 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2864 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2865 and other systems.
2866
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002867- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2868 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2869 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2870 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 +00002871 work well with these.
2872
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002873- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2874
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002875- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002876 connections.
2877
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002878- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2879 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2880 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2881
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002882- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2883 sets
2884
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002885- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2886 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2887 name.
2888
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002889- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2890 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2891 passed in.
2892
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002893- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002894 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002895 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2896 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002897
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002898- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2899
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002900- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2901
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002902- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2903 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2904 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2905
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002906- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2907 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2908 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2909 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002910 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002911
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002912- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002913 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002914 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002915
2916- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2917 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2918 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2919
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002920- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002921 the value of its expression argument.
2922
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002923- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2924 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2925 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2926
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002927- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2928 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2929 skipstone browser was included.
2930
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002931- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2932 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2933
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002934Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002935-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002936
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002937- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2938 names in addition to accepting file names.
2939
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002940- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2941 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2942 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2943 still used and useful.)
2944
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002945- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2946 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2947 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2948 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002949
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002950- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2951 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2952 the generated binary.
2953
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002954Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002956
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002957- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2958
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002959- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2960 except in the hands of experts.
2961
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002962- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002963 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2964 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2965 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002966
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002967- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2968 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2969 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2970 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2971 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2972 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2973 builds.
2974
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002975- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2976 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2977 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2978 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2979 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2980 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2981 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2982 new type.
2983
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002984- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002985
2986 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2987 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2988 positive infinities.
2989
2990 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2991 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2992 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2993 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2994 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2995 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2996 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2997
2998 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2999
3000 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3001
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003002- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3003 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3004 size of the executable.
3005
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003006- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3007 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3008 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3009 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003010
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003011- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3012
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003013- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3014 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3015 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003016
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003017- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3018 well as Unix.
3019
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003020- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3021 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3022 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3023 modules in the README file for details.
3024
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003025C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003027
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003028- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3029 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003030 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003031 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003032 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003033
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003034- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3035 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3036 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3037 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3038 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3039 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003040 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003041 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3042 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3043 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3044 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3045 aligned.)
3046
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003047- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3048 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3049 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3050
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003051- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3052 level.
3053
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003054- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3055 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3056 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3057 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3058 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3059
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003060- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3061 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3062 code.
3063
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003064- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3065 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3066 adjusting for negative indices.
3067
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003068- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3069 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3070 object.
3071
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003072- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3073 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3074 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3075
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003076- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3077 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003078
3079- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3080
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003081- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3082 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3083 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3084 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3085
3086- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3087
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003088- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003089
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003090- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003091 without going through the buffer API.
3092
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003093- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003094
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003095- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3096 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3097 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3098 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3099
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003100- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3101 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3102
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003103- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003104 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3105
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003106New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003107-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003108
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003109- OpenVMS is now supported.
3110
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003111- AtheOS is now supported.
3112
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003113- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3114
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003115- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3116
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003117Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003118-----
3119
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003120- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3121 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3122 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003123
3124Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003125-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003126
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003127- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3128 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3129 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3130 bugs.
3131 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003132 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003133 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3134 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003135 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003136
3137- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003138 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003139
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003140- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3141 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3142
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003143- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3144 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003145 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003146 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3147
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003148- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3149 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3150 use files" uninstall option).
3151
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003152- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3153
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003154- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3155 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3156
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003157- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3158 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3159 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3160
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003161- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3162 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3163 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3164 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3165 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003166 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3167 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3168 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003169
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003170- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003171 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003172 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3173 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3174 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3175 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3176 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3177 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3178 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3179 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3180 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3181 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3182 work around.
3183
3184- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3185 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3186 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3187 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3188 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3189 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3190 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3191 specified with O_CREAT too).
3192
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003193Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194----
3195
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003196- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003197
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003198- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3199 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3200 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3201
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003202- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3203 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3204 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3205
3206- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3207 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3208 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3209 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3210 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3211 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3212 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3213 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003214
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003215- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3216 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3217 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003218
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003219- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3220 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3221 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3222 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3223 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003224
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003225- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3226 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3227 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003228
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003229- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3230 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003231
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003232- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3233 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3234 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3235 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3236 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003237
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003238- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3239 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3240 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3241
3242- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3243 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3244 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003245
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003246- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3247 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3248 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3249 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003250 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003251
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003252- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3253 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003254
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003255- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3256 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003257
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003258- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003259 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003260 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3261 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003262
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003263
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003264What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003265===============================
3266
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003267*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3268
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003269Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003270--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003271
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003272- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3273 with a custom metaclass.
3274
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003275Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003277
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003278- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3279 are proxies.
3280
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003281Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003283
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003284- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3285 very short strings.
3286
3287- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3288 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3289 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3290 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3291 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3292
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003293Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003294-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003295
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003296- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3297 close or delete time).
3298
3299- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3300 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3301
3302- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3303
3304- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003305 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003306
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003307Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003309
3310Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003312
3313C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003315
3316New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003318
3319Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003321
3322Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003324
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003325- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3326
3327- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3328 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3329
3330- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3331 deleted at process exit time.
3332
3333- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3334 in backslash.
3335
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003336Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003338
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003339- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3340 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3341 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3342
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003343
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003344What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003345===========================
3346
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003347*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3348
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003349Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003350--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003351
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003352- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3353 been extensively updated. See
3354
3355 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3356
3357 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3358
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003359- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3360 deleted!
3361
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003362- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3363 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3364 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3365 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3366 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3367
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003368- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3369
3370 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3371 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3372
3373 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3374 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3375 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3376 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3377 supported anyway.
3378
3379 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3380 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3381
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003382- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3383 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3384 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3385 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3386 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003387
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003388- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3389 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3390 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3391
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003392Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003393-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003394
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003395- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3396 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3397 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3398 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3399 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3400 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003401 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3402 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3403 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3404 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003405
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003406- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3407 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3408 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3409
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003410Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003411-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003412
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003413- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3414
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003415Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003417
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003418- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3419 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3420 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3421 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3422 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3423 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3424
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003425- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3426
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003427- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3428
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003429- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3430
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003431- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3432 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3433 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3434
3435- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3436
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003437Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003439
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003440- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3441 off a search on Google.
3442
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003443Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003445
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003446- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3447 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3448 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3449 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3450 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3451 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3452 other platforms should do likewise.
3453
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003454- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3455 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3456 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3457
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003458C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003460
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003461- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3462 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3463 producing key-value pairs.
3464
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003465- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003466 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003467 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3468 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3469 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3470 previously went unchallenged.
3471
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003472New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003473-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003474
3475Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003477
3478Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003480
3481Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003483
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003484- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3485 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003486
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003487- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3488 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3489 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3490 home.
3491
3492
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003493What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003494===========================
3495
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3497
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003498Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003500
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003501- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3502 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003503
3504 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003505 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003506
3507 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3508 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003509 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003510 This needs to be documented.
3511
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003512- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3513 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3514
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003515- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3516 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3517 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3518
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003519- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3520 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3521
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003522- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3523 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3524 class forbids it).
3525
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003526- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3527 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3528 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3529
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003530- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3531
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003532Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003534
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003535- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3536 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003537 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003538
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003539- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3540 (like 1 + '').
3541
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003542Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003544
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003545- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3546 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3547 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3548 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003549 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003550 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3551
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003552- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3553 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3554 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3555 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3556
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003557- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3558 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003559 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3560 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3561 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003562
3563- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3564 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003565
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003566- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3567 bytes on its input.
3568
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003569Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003571
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003572- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003573 convenience function.
3574
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003575- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3576 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3577 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003578 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3579 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3580 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3581 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3582 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3583 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003584
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003585- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3586 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3587 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3588 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3589
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003590- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3591 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3592 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3593
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003594- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3595 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3596 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3597 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3598
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003599- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3600 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003602 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3603 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3604 new -l and -e options.
3605
3606- statcache is now deprecated.
3607
3608- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3609 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003611 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3612 time properly taken into account.
3613
3614- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3615 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3616 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3617 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3618
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003619Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003621
3622Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003624
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003625- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3626 is built with libdb3 if available.
3627
3628- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3629
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003630C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003632
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003633- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3634 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3635 PySequence_Size().
3636
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003637- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3638
3639- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3640 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3641 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3642
3643- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3644 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3645
3646- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3647 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3648
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003649New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003651
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003652- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3653 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3654
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003655- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3656 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3657
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003658- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3659
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003660Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003661-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003662
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003663- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3664 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3665
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003666Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003667-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003668
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003669Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003671
3672- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3673 removed completely in the next release.
3674
3675- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3676 OSX.
3677
3678- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3679 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3680
3681- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3682
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003683
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003684What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003685===========================
3686
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003687*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3688
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003689Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003691
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003692- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003693 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003694 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003695 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3696 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003697 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3698 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003699 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3700 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003701
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003702- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3703 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3704
3705- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3706 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3707
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003708Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003710
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003711- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3712 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3713 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3714 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3715 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3716 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3717 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3718 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3719
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003720- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3721 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3722 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3723 example).
3724
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003725- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003726 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003727 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003728 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003729
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003730- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3731 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3732 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003733 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003734
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003735- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3736 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3737 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3738 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3739 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3740 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3741
3742 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3743
3744 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3745
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003746Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003748
3749- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3750
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003751- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3752
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003753- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3754 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003755
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003756- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3757 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3758 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3759 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3760 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3761 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003762 attributes.
3763
3764- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3765 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3766 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003767
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003768- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3769 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3770 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003771
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003772- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3773 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3774 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003775 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3776 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3777
3778- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3779 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003780
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003781Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003783
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003784- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3785 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3786
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003787- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3788 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3789 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3790 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3791
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003792- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3793 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3794 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3795 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3796
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003797 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3798 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3799 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3800 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3801 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3802 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3803 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3804 without losing information).
3805
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003806- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003807 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3808 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3809 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3810 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3811 module).
3812
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003813 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003814 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3815 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3816 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3817 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003818
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003819- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003820 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3821 encoding.
3822
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003823- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3824 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3825
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003826- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003827 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3828
3829- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3830 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3831 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3832 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3833
3834- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3835
3836- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3837 ON, and OFF.
3838
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003839- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3840 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3841
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003842Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003844
3845- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3846 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3847 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003848
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003849- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3850 been added: -X and -E.
3851
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003852Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003854
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003855- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3856 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3857
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003858C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003860
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003861- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3862 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3863 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3864 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3865 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3866
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003867- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3868 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3869 as long) arguments.
3870
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003871- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3872 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3873 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3874 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3875 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3876 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3877
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003878- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3879 input.
3880
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003881New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003883
3884Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003885-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003886
3887Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003888-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003889
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003890- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3891 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3892 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3893
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003894- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3895 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3896 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003897 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003898
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3900 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3901 import signal
3902 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003903
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003904 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003905 while 1:
3906 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003907 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003908 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3909 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3910 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3911 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003912
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003913
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003914What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3915===========================
3916
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3918
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003919Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003921
3922- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3923 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3924 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3925
3926- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3927 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3928 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3929 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3930 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3931 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3932 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003933
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003934- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003935 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003936 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3937 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3938 associate a docstring with a property.
3939
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003940- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3941 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3942 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3943 other built-in object types.
3944
3945- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3946 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3947 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3948 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3949 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3950
3951- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3952 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3953
3954- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3955 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003956 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003957 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3958 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3959 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3960 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3961 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3962
3963- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3964 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3965 class.
3966
3967- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3968 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3969 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3970 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3971
3972- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3973 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3974 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3975 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3976
3977- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3978 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3979
3980- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3981 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3982 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3983 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3984 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003985 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003986 with the same value as s.
3987
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003988- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3989
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003990Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003992
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003993- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3994
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003995- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3996 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3997 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3998 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3999 objects.
4000
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004001- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4002 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004003 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4004 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4005
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004006- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4007 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4008 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4009
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004010Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004012
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004013- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4014 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4015 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4016 by the instances.
4017
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004018- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4019 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4020 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4021
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004022- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4023 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4024 before the entire comparison is complete.
4025
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004026- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4027 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4028 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4029
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004030- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4031 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4032 getwriter().
4033
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004034- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4035 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4036
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004037- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004038 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4039 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4040
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004041- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4042 iterable object.
4043
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004044- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4045 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004046
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004047- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4048 authentication.
4049
4050- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4051 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004052
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004053- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004054 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4055 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4056 a sample driver.)
4057
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004058Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004059-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004060
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004061- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4062 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4063 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4064 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4065 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4066 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4067 kernel has large file support.
4068
4069- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4070 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4071 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4072 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4073 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4074
4075- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4076 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4077 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4078
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004079C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004081
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004082- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4083 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4084
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004085New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004087
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004088- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4089 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4090
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004091Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004093
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004094- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4095 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4096 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4097 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4098 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4099
4100- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4101 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4102 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4103 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4104
4105- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4106 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4107
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004108Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004110
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004111- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004112 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4113 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004114
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004115
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004116What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4117===========================
4118
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4120
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004121Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004123
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004124- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4125 big to represent as a C double.
4126
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004127- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4128 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4129 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4130 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4131 restriction).
4132
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004133- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4134 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4135 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4136 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4137 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4138
4139 >>> dir([])
4140 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4141 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4142 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4143 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4144 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4145 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4146 'reverse', 'sort']
4147
4148 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4149
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004150- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004151 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4152 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4153 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4154 OverflowError exception.
4155
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004156- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004157 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004158 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4159 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4160 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4161 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4162 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004163 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4165 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4166
4167 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4168 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4169 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4170 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004171
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004172- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004173 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4174 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4175 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4176 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4177 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4178 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4179 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4180 once it is created.
4181
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004182- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4183 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4184 (key, value) pairs.
4185
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004186- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004187 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4188 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4189
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004190- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4191 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4192 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4193 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4194 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004195
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004196- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004197 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4198 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4199
4200 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4201
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004202- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004203 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4204
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004205Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004207
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004208- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004209 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4210 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004211
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004212- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4213 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4214 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4215 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4216 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4217 in this area anymore).
4218
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004219- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4220 threading.Timer.
4221
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004222- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4223 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4224
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004225- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004226 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4227
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004228- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004229 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4230 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4231 converted to Python longs.
4232
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004233- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004234 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4235
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004236- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4237 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4238 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4239
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004240Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004242
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004243- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4244 division operators as per PEP 238.
4245
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004246Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004248
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004249- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4250 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4251 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4252 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4253
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004254C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004255-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004256
4257- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004258
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004259- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4260 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004261 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4264 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004265 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004267
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004268- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004269 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4270 module:
4271
4272 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004273
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004274 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4275 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004276
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004277 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4278 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004279
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004280 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4281
4282 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4283
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004284- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004285 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4286 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4287 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004288
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004289New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004290-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004291
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004292- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4293 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4294 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4295 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4296 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004297
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004298Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004300
4301Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004303
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004304- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4305 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4306 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4307 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004308 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4309 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4310 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4311 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4312 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004313
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004314- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004315 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4316
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004317
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004318What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4319===========================
4320
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4322
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004323Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004325
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004326- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4327 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4328
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004329- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4330 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4331 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004332
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004333- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4334 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4335 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4336 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004337
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004338- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004341
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004342Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004344
4345- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004346 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004347 the module docstring for details.
4348
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004349Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004351
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004352- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004353 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4354 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4355 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004356
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004357- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4358 Nick Mathewson.
4359
4360Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004362
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004363- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4364 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4365 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4366 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4367 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4368 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4369 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4370 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4371
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004372- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4373 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4374 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4375 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4376
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004377- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4378 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4379 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4380 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4381 come a long way).
4382
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004383- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4384 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4385 write filters for these warnings).
4386
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004387- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4388 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4389 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4390 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4391 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4392
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004393- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4394 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4395 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4396 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4397 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4398 older distribution.
4399
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004400Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004402
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004403- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4404 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004405 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004406
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004407- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4408 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4409 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4410
4411- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4412
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004413- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4414
4415- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4416
4417- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4418
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004419- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004420
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004421- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4422
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004423New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004425
4426C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004427-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004428
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004429- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4430 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4431 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4432 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4433 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4434 against buffer overruns.
4435
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004436- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004437 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4438 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004439 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4440 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4441 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4442
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004443- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4444 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4445 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4446 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4447 deprecated.
4448
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004449Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004451
4452- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4453 relevant is found.
4454
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004455
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004456What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004457===========================
4458
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004459*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4460
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004461Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004463
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004464- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4465 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4466 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4467 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4468 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4469 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4470 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4471 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004472 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004473 repaired.
4474
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004475- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004476 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004477 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4478 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4479 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4480 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4481 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4482 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4483 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4484 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4485
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004486- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4487 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4488 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4489 leading BMO character).
4490
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004491- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4492 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4493 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4494
4495 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4496 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4497 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004498
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004499 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4500 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4501 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4502 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4503 for various simple to use conversions.
4504
4505 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4506 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4507
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4509 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4510 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4511 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4512 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4513 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4514 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4515 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4516 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4517 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4518 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4519 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4520 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4521 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4522 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004523
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004524- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4525 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4526 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004527 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004528 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004529
4530 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004531 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4532 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4533 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4534 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4535 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004536 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4537 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004538
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004539 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4540 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4541 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004542 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004543
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004544- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4545 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4546 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4547 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4548 floating arithmetic,
4549
4550 x = 9007199254740992.0
4551 print long(x)
4552
4553 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4554 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4555 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4556 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4557 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4558 functions are of good quality).
4559
4560 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4561 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4562 algorithms to break.
4563
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004564- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4565 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4566 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4567 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4568 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4569 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4570 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4571 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4572 order.
4573
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004574- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4575 operation along the most common code paths.
4576
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004577- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4578 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4579
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004580- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4581 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4582 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4583 {}.update(UserDict())
4584
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004585- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4586 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4587 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4588 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4589 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4590 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4591 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4592 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4593
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004594- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004595 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004597 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004598 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4599 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004600 join() method of strings
4601 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004602 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4603 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004605 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004606
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004607- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4608 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4609
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004610- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4611 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4612
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004613- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4614 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4615 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4616 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4617
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004618- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4619 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004620 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004621 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4622 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004623
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004624- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4625
4626
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004627Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004628-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004629
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004630- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004631 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004632 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4633 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4634
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004635- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4636 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4637
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004638- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4639 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4640 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4641 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4642
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004643- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4644 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4645 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4646
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004647- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4648
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004649- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4650
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004651- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4652 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4653 that are still imported into string.py).
4654
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004655- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4656
4657- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4658 Now it does.
4659
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004660- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4661
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004662- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4663 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4664 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4665 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4666 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004667 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4668 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004669
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004670- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4671 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4672 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4673 'help(object)'.
4674
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004675Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004676-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004677
4678- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004679 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004680 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4681 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4682
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004683- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004684 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4685 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004686
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004687C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004689
4690- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4691 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004692
4693----
4694
4695**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**