blob: 4733bfb4913842dfe5a5d1b76edba25c69c80ddb [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000013- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
14 list.sort().
15
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000016
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
20
21Library
22-------
23
Raymond Hettinger4ebe3642004-12-05 04:55:14 +000024- the depecated statcache module was removed.
25
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +000026- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
27
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +000028- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
29
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +000030- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
31
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +000032- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
33 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
34 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
35
Raymond Hettinger784ab762004-12-04 10:50:51 +000036- the deprecated whrandom module was removed. Use the random module instead.
37
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000038- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000039 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000040
41
42Build
43-----
44
45
46C API
47-----
48
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +000049- Removed PyRange_New().
50
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000051
52Tests
53-----
54
55
56Mac
57---
58
59
60
61Tools/Demos
62-----------
63
64
65
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000066What's New in Python 2.4 final?
67===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000068
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +000069*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +000070
71Core and builtins
72-----------------
73
74- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
75 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
76 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
77
78
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +000079What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
80==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000081
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +000082*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000083
84Core and builtins
85-----------------
86
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +000087- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
88 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
89 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
90
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000091
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000092Library
93-------
94
95- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
96 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
97 raised is re-raised.
98
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +000099- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
100 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
101
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000102- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
103 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
104 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
105 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
106 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
107 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
108 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
109 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
110 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
111 by the slice are recomputed now.
112
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000113- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000114
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000115Build
116-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000117
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000118- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
119 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
120 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000121
122C API
123-----
124
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000125- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
126
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000127
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000128What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
129================================
130
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000131*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000132
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000133License
134-------
135
136The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
137is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
138changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
139Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
140intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
141durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
142the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
143License::
144
145 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
146
147says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
148to Python 2.1.1.
149
150The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
151License Version 2.
152
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000153Core and builtins
154-----------------
155
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000156- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
157 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
158 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
159 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
160 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
161 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
162 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
163 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
164 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
165 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
166
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000167- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000168
169Extension Modules
170-----------------
171
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000172- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
173 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
174 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
175 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000176
177Library
178-------
179
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000180- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
181 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
182 returned.
183
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000184- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
185
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000186- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
187 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
188
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000189- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
190
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000191- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
192 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000193
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000194- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
195
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000196- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
197
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000198- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000199 the source code is updated and reloaded.
200
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000201Build
202-----
203
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000204- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000205
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000206What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
207================================
208
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000209*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000210
211Core and builtins
212-----------------
213
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000214- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000215 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
216
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000217- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
218 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
219 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
220 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
221
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000222- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
223 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
224
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000225- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
226 constant.
227
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000228- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
229 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
230 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
231 large), and to anomalies such as
232 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
233 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
234 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
235 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000236
237Extension modules
238-----------------
239
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000240- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
241 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000242 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
243 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
244 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000245
246Library
247-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000248
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000249- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000250 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000251 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
252 --swig-cpp.
253
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000254- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
255 it is set.
256
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000257- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000258
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000259- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
260 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
261 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
262 Closes bug #1039270.
263
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000264- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000265
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000266 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000267 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
268 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
269 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
270 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
271 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
272 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
273 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
274 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
275 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
276 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
277 + Updates to documentation.
278
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000279- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
280 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
281 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
282 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
283
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000284- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000285
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000286- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
287 applications should use the getmember function.
288
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000289- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
290
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000291- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
292 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
293 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
294 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
295 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
296 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
297 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
298 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
299 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
300
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000301- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
302 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000303 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000304
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000305- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
306 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
307 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
308 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
309 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
310 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
311 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
312 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000313
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000314- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
315 the new public features (of which there are many).
316
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000317- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000318 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
319 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
320 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
321 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000322 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000323
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000324- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
325
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000326- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
327 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
328 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
329 options.
330
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000331- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
332 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
333 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
334 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
335 conditions under which non-string values work.
336
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000337Build
338-----
339
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000340- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
341 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
342 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
343
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000344- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
345 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
346 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
347 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
348 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000349
350C API
351-----
352
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000353- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
354 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
355
356- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
357
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000358- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
359 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
360 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
361 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
362 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
363 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
364 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
365 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
366 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
367
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000368- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
369
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000370- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
371 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
372 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000373
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000374Tests
375-----
376
377- test__locale ported to unittest
378
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000379Mac
380---
381
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000382- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
383 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
384 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000385
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000386Tools/Demos
387-----------
388
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000389- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
390 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
391 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
392 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
393 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000394
395
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000396What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
397=================================
398
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000399*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000400
401Core and builtins
402-----------------
403
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000404- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000405 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
406
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000407- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
408 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
409 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
410 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
411 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
412 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
413 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
414 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000415 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
416 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
417 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
418 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
419 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000420
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000421- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
422 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
423 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
424 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
425 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
426
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000427- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
428
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000429- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
430 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
431
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000432- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
433 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
434 modified the list.
435
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000436- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
437 functions is now writable.
438
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000439- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
440 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
441 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
442 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
443
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000444- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
445 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
446 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
447 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
448 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000449
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000450- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
451 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
452
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000453Extension modules
454-----------------
455
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000456- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
457
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000458- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
459 data.
460
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000461- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
462 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
463 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
464 supposed to have been truncated away.
465
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000466- Added socket.socketpair().
467
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000468- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
469 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
470
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000471- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000472 versions of Python, have now been removed.
473
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000474Library
475-------
476
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000477- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000478 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000479
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000480- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
481 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
482
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000483- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
484 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
485
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000486- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
487
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000488- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
489 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000490
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000491- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
492 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
493
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000494- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
495
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000496- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
497
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000498- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
499
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000500- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
501 Percivall.
502
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000503- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
504 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
505
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000506- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
507 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
508 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000509 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000510
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000511- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
512 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
513 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
514 and exponent.
515
516- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
517
518- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
519 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
520 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
521
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000522- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
523 to the readline module.
524
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000525- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000526 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
527 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000528
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000529- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
530 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
531 contains symlinks.
532
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000533- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
534 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
535
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000536- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
537 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
538 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
539
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000540- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
541 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
542 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
543 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
544 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
545 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
546 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
547 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
548 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
549 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
550 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
551 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
552 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
553
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000554- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
555
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000556Tools/Demos
557-----------
558
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000559- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
560 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
561
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000562- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
563
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000564Build
565-----
566
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000567- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
568 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
569 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
570 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
571 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
572 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
573 plans to do so.
574
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000575- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
576 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
577
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000578- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
579 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
580
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000581- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
582 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
583
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000584- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
585 GNU/k*BSD systems.
586
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000587- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
588 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
589
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000590C API
591-----
592
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000593..
594
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000595Documentation
596-------------
597
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000598- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
599 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
600
601- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
602 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
603 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000604
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000605New platforms
606-------------
607
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000608- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
609
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000610Tests
611-----
612
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000613..
614
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000615Windows
616-------
617
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000618- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
619 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
620 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
621 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
622 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
623 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
624 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
625 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
626 the problem.
627
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000628Mac
629---
630
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000631..
632
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000633
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000634What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
635=================================
636
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000637*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000638
639Core and builtins
640-----------------
641
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000642- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
643 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
644 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
645 sensitive code.
646
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000647- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000648 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000649
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000650 @staticmethod
651 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000652
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000653 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000654
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000655- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
656 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
657 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
658 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
659 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
660 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
661 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
662 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
663 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
664 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
665 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
666
667 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
668 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
669 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
670 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
671 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
672 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
673 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
674
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000675- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
676 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
677
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000678- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000679 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000680
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000681- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000682 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000683 which was missing for no apparent reason.
684
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000685- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000686 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
687 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
688
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000689- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
690 types that support garbage collection.
691
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000692- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
693
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000694- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
695 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
696 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
697 Jython.
698
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000699- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
700
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000701- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
702 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
703
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000704- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
705 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
706 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000707
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000708- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
709 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
710 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
711
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000712Extension modules
713-----------------
714
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000715- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
716
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000717Library
718-------
719
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000720- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
721 TIS-620
722
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000723- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
724 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
725 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
726 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
727 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
728 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
729 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
730 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
731 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
732 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
733
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000734- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
735
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000736- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
737 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
738 same as when the argument is omitted).
739 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
740
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000741- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
742
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000743- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
744 schemes are offered.
745
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000746- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
747
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000748- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
749 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
750 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
751
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000752- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
753
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000754- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
755 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
756
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000757- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
758 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
759 when dummy_threading is being used.
760
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000761- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
762 from a tarfile.
763
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000764- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000765 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000766
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000767- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
768 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
769 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
770 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
771
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000772- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
773 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
774
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000775- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
776 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
777 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
778 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
779 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
780 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
781 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
782 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
783 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
784 by some other method in progress).
785
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000786- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
787 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
788 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000789
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000790- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
791
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000792- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
793 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
794 AM Kuchling.
795
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000796- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
797 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
798 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
799
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000800- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
801 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
802 instead of unsigned.
803
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000804- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000805 no longer part of the public API.
806
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000807- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
808 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
809 string methods of the same name).
810
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000811- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000812 SF patch 945642.
813
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000814- doctest unittest integration improvements:
815
816 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
817
818 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
819 DocTestSuites.
820
821- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
822 that provide thread-local data.
823
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000824- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
825 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
826
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000827- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
828
829- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
830 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
831 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
832
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000833- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
834
835 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
836 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
837 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000838
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000839 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
840 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
841 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
842 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
843
844 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
845 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
846
847 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
848 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
849 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
850 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
851
852 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
853 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
854 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
855 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
856 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
857
858 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
859 wrapping help output.
860
861 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
862 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
863 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000864
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000865C API
866-----
867
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000868- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
869 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
870 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
871 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
872 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
873 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
874 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
875 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
876 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
877 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
878 its visible semantics have not changed.
879
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000880- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
881 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
882
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000883Documentation
884-------------
885
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000886- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000887
888 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000889 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000890
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000891 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000892
893 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
894
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000895- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000896
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000897Tests
898-----
899
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000900- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000901 platforms that use the Makefile.
902
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000903- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
904 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
905 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
906
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000907
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000908What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
909=================================
910
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000911*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000912
913Core and builtins
914-----------------
915
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000916- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
917 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
918 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
919 objects now (one object instead of three).
920
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000921- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
922 Windows DLLs.
923
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000924- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
925 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000926
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000927- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
928 a new .pyc magic.
929
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000930- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
931 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
932 be there.
933
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000934- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
935 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
936 the LC_NUMERIC category.
937
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000938- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
939 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
940 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
941
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000942- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
943
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000944- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
945 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
946 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000947
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000948- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
949 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
950
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000951- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
952
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000953- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000954 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000955
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000956- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
957
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000958- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
959
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000960- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
961 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
962
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000963- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
964 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
965 Fixes bug #858016 .
966
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000967- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
968 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
969 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
970
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000971- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
972 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
973 improves their performance (about 35%).
974
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000975- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
976 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
977 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
978
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000979- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
980 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
981 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
982 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
983
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000984- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
985 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
986 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
987 length is not known).
988
989- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
990 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000991 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
992 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000993 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
994
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000995- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
996 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
997
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000998- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
999 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1000 keyword arguments.
1001
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001002- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1003 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1004 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1005
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001006- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1007 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1008 cases.
1009
1010- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1011 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1012 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1013 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1014 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1015 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1016 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1017 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1018 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1019 a release build.
1020
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001021- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1022 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1023
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001024- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001025 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001026
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001027- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1028 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1029 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1030 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1031 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1032 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1033 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1034 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1035 destroyed.
1036
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001037- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1038 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1039 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1040 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1041 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1042 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1043 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1044 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1045
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001046- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1047 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1048 character other than a space.
1049
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001050- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1051 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1052 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1053 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1054 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1055 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1056 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1057 attributes with the same name.
1058
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001059- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1060 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1061 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1062 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1063 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1064 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1065 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1066 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1067 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1068 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1069 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1070 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1071 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1072 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001073
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001074- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1075 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1076 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1077 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1078 This has been repaired.
1079
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001080- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1081
1082- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1083
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001084- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1085 over a sequence.
1086
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001087- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001088 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001089
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001090- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1091
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001092- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1093 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1094 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1095 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1096 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1097 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1098 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1099 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1100
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001101- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1102 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1103 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1104
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001105- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1106 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1107 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1108 freelist.
1109
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001110- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1111 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1112
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001113- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1114 number.
1115
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001116- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1117 a TypeError exception.
1118
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001119- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1120 820195.
1121
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001122- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1123 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1124 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1125
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001126- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001127 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1128 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001129
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001130- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1131 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1132 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1133
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001134- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1135 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001136 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001137
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001138- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001139 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1140 the first call.
1141
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001142
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001143Extension modules
1144-----------------
1145
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001146- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1147 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1148
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001149- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1150 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1151 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1152 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1153 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1154 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1155 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001156
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001157- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1158
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001159- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1160
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001161- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1162 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1163
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001164- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1165 fewer false positives.
1166
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001167- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1168 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1169
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001170- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001171 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1172
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001173- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001174 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001175 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001176 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1177 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001178
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001179- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1180 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1181 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1182 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1183
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001184- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1185 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1186 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1187 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1188 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1189 #897625.
1190
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001191- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1192 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1193
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001194- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1195 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1196 and pops on either side of the deque.
1197
1198- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1199 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1200
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001201- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1202 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1203 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1204 other functions that expect a function argument.
1205
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001206- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1207
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001208- os.getsid was added.
1209
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001210- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1211 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1212 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1213
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001214- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1215
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001216- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1217
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001218- readline.clear_history was added.
1219
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001220- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1221
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001222- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1223
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001224- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1225
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001226- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1227
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001228- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1229
1230- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1231
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001232- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1233
1234- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1235
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001236- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1237 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1238 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1239
1240- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1241 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1242 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1243 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1244 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1245 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1246 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1247
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001248- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1249 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1250 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1251 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001252
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001253- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001254 iterators from a single iterable.
1255
1256- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1257 of raising a TypeError exception.
1258
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001259- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1260 as parameter.
1261
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001262Library
1263-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001264
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001265- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1266 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1267 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001268
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001269- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1270 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1271 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001272
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001273- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001274
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001275- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1276 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001277
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001278- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1279 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1280
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001281- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1282
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001283- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001284 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001285
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001286- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001287 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001288
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001289- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1290
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001291- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1292 on cygwin and mingw32.
1293
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001294- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1295
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001296- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1297 module.
1298
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001299- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1300 installation scheme for all platforms.
1301
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001302- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001303 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001304
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001305- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1306 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1307 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1308
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001309- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1310 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1311 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1312
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001313- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1314
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001315- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1316
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001317- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1318 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1319
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001320- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1321 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1322 type pattern with the same value exists.
1323
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001324- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1325 when run from the command prompt).
1326
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001327- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1328 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1329
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001330- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1331 default sort).
1332
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001333- Added global runctx function to profile module
1334
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001335- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1336
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001337- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1338
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001339- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1340
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001341- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001342 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1343 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1344 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1345 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1346 accordingly.
1347
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001348- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1349 decoding standards.
1350
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001351- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1352 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1353 called for all requests.
1354
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001355- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1356 they are passed to the compiler.
1357
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001358- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1359 indent, width and depth.
1360
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001361- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1362 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1363
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001364- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1365 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1366
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001367- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1368
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001369- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1370
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001371- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1372
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001373- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1374 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1375
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001376- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001377 for better performance.
1378
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001379- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001380
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001381- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1382 a string).
1383
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001384- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1385
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001386- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1387
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001388- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1389
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001390- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1391
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001392- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1393 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1394 list of fieldnames.
1395
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001396- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1397 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1398
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001399- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1400
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001401- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1402 empty lists.
1403
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001404- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1405 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1406 and shelves.
1407
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001408- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1409 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1410
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001411- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001412 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1413 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001414
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001415- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1416 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001417 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001418
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001419- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001420 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1421 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1422
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001423- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1424 and removed in Py2.4.
1425
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001426- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1427
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001428- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1429
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001430Tools/Demos
1431-----------
1432
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001433- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1434 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1435
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001436- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1437
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001438- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1439 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1440 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1441 destination in situations where both files are given.
1442
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001443- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1444 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1445 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1446 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1447
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001448- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1449
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001450- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1451 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1452 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1453 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1454 now.
1455
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001456- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1457 in effect
1458
1459- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1460 C-c C-h
1461
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001462- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1463 -d option was given.
1464
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001465Build
1466-----
1467
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001468- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1469 build under OS X.
1470
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001471- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1472 --enable-profiling.
1473
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001474- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1475 is configured --with-tsc.
1476
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001477- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1478 on AMD64.
1479
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001480- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1481 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1482
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001483- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1484 removed.
1485
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001486- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1487 supported (see PEP 11).
1488
1489- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1490
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001491- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1492
1493- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1494 (see PEP 11).
1495
1496- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1497 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1498
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001499C API
1500-----
1501
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001502- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1503 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1504 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1505
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001506- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1507 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1508 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1509 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1510
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001511- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1512 generator objects.
1513
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001514- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1515 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001516 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1517 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001518
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001519- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1520 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1521
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001522- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1523 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1524 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1525 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1526 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1527
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001528- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1529 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1530 about 10% faster.
1531
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001532- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1533 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1534
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001535- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1536 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1537 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1538 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1539
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001540Windows
1541-------
1542
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001543- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1544 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1545 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1546 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1547
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001548- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1549 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1550 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1551
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001552
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001553What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1554===============================
1555
1556*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1557
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001558IDLE
1559----
1560
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001561- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1562 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1563 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1564 context-menu actions.
1565
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001566- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1567 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1568 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1569 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1570 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1571 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1572 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1573 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1574 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1575
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001576
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001577What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1578=============================================
1579
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001580*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001581
1582Core and builtins
1583-----------------
1584
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001585- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001586 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001587 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1588
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001589Extension modules
1590-----------------
1591
1592- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1593 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1594 than once. This has been fixed.
1595
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001596- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1597 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1598 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1599 call.
1600
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001601- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1602
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001603Library
1604-------
1605
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001606- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1607 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1608
1609- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1610 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1611 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1612 restored.
1613
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001614IDLE
1615----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001616
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001617- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001618
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001619Build
1620-----
1621
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001622- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1623 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1624
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001625C API
1626-----
1627
1628Windows
1629-------
1630
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001631- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1632 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1633
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001634- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1635
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001636Mac
1637---
1638
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001639- Various fixes to pimp.
1640
1641- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1642
1643- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1644 more problems than it solves.
1645
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001646
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001647What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1648=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001649
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001650*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1651
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001652Core and builtins
1653-----------------
1654
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001655- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1656 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1657
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001658- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1659 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001660 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001661
1662- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1663 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1664 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001665 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001666
1667- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1668 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001669
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001670- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1671 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1672 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1673
1674- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001675 770247.
1676
1677- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001678
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001679Extension modules
1680-----------------
1681
1682- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1683 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1684
1685- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1686
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001687- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1688
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001689- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1690 contained within the _strptime module.
1691
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001692- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1693 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1694
1695- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001696 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1697
1698- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1699 the find_class attribute, if present.
1700
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001701- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001702
1703 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1704 (SF bug 763298).
1705
1706 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001707 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1708 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1709 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001710
1711 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1712
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001713Library
1714-------
1715
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001716- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1717
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001718- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1719 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1720 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1721 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1722 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1723 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1724 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1725 or Tester().
1726
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001727- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1728 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1729 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1730 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1731 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1732 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1733 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1734 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1735 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001736
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001737 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001738
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001739- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1740 weren't before was an oversight.
1741
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001742- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1743 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1744
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001745- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1746 when there are no lines.
1747
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001748- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1749 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1750
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001751- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1752 to child processes.
1753
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001754- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1755
1756- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1757
1758- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1759 xmlrpclib.
1760
1761- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1762 responses.
1763
1764- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1765 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1766
1767- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1768 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1769 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1770
1771- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1772 used as patterns.
1773
1774- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1775 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1776 than Tk 8.3.
1777
1778- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1779
1780- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001781
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001782Tools/Demos
1783-----------
1784
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001785- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1786
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001787- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1788
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001789- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001790
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001791Build
1792-----
1793
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001794- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1795
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001796- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1797
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001798- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1799 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001800
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001801- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1802 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1803 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001804
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001805C API
1806-----
1807
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001808- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1809 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1810
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001811Windows
1812-------
1813
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001814- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1815 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1816 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1817 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1818 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1819 Python exception ::
1820
1821 thread.error: can't start new thread
1822
1823 is raised now.
1824
1825- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1826 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1827 instead of from DLL teardown.
1828
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001829Mac
1830---
1831
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001832- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001833 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001834 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1835 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1836 the executable in the bundle.
1837
1838- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001839
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001840- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1841
1842- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1843 on Panther.
1844
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001845What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1846================================
1847
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001848*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001849
1850Core and builtins
1851-----------------
1852
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001853- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1854 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1855 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1856 with the -i option.
1857
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001858- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1859 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1860
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001861- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1862 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1863
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001864- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1865 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1866 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1867 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1868 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1869 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1870 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1871 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1872 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1873 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1874 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1875 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1876 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001877
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001878- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1879 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1880 embedded in a lambda expression.
1881
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001882- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1883 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1884 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1885 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1886 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1887
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001888- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1889 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1890 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1891
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001892- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1893 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1894
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001895- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1896 It's writable again.
1897
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001898- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1899 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1900 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001901 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001902
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001903- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1904 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1905 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1906
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001907Extension modules
1908-----------------
1909
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001910- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1911 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1912
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001913- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1914 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1915 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1916 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1917
1918- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1919 collection.
1920
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001921- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1922 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1923 unique within a single program run.
1924
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001925- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1926 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1927
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001928- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1929 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1930
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001931- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1932 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001933
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001934- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1935
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001936- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1937 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1938
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001939- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1940 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1941 for many BSD-derived systems.
1942
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001943
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001944Library
1945-------
1946
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001947- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1948 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1949 primary ones:
1950
1951 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1952 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1953 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1954
1955 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1956 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1957 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1958 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1959 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1960 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1961
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001962- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1963 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1964 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1965 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1966 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1967 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1968 argument.
1969
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001970- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1971 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1972 in the archive.
1973
1974- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1975 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1976
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001977- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1978 569574).
1979
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001980- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1981 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1982 no more.
1983
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001984- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1985 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1986 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1987 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1988 code coverage.
1989
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001990- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1991 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1992 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001993 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1994 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001995
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001996- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1997 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1998 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001999 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002000
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002001- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2002
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002003- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2004 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2005 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2006 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2007
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002008- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2009 handling.
2010
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002011- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2012 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2013
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002014- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2015 in socket.py.
2016
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002017- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2018
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002019- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2020 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2021 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2022 opener with proxy support.
2023
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002024- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2025
2026- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2027
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002028Tools/Demos
2029-----------
2030
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002031- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2032
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002033- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2034
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002035- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2036 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002037
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002038- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2039 files.
2040
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002041Build
2042-----
2043
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002044- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002045 different root directory.
2046
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002047C API
2048-----
2049
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002050- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2051 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2052 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2053 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2054 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2055 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2056 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2057 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2058 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2059 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2060
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002061- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2062 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2063 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2064 from Python.
2065
2066
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002067New platforms
2068-------------
2069
2070None this time.
2071
2072Tests
2073-----
2074
2075- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2076 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2077
2078Windows
2079-------
2080
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002081- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2082
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002083- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2084 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2085 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2086 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2087 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2088 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2089 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2090 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2091 that's what it's for.
2092
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002093Mac
2094---
2095
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002096- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2097 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2098 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2099 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002100- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2101 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2102- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002103
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002104SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2105------------------------------------
2106
2107430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2108598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2109622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2110661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2111683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2112697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2113713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2114724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2115727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2116729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2117730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2118731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2119732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2120733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2121735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2122740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2123744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2124745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2125747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2126749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2127751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2128753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2129755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2130757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2131760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2132
2133
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002134What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2135================================
2136
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002137*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002138
2139Core and builtins
2140-----------------
2141
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002142- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2143 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2144
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002145- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2146 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2147 and cannot be strings).
2148
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002149- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2150 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2151 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2152 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2153
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002154- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2155 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2156 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2157 Python itself.
2158
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002159- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2160 the referenced object, if it has one.
2161
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002162- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2163 the thread started at
2164 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2165
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002166- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2167 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2168 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2169 placed on a list index.
2170
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002171- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2172 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2173 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2174 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2175
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002176- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2177 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2178 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2179 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2180 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2181 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2182 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2183
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002184- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2185 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2186 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2187 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2188 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2189
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002190- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2191 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002192
2193- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2194 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2195 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2196 #693195.)
2197
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002198- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2199 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002200
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002201- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002202 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002203 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2204 interpreter executions, would fail.
2205
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002206- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002207 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002208 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002209
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002210Extension modules
2211-----------------
2212
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002213- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2214 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2215 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2216 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2217
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002218- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2219 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2220
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002221- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2222 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2223 and Greg Chapman.)
2224
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002225- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2226 recursively.
2227
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002228- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002229 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2230 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2231 leaks.
2232
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002233- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2234
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002235- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2236 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2237 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2238 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2239 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2240 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2241 #705836.
2242
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002243- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002244 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2245
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002246- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2247 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2248 See SF bug #692416.
2249
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002250- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2251 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2252
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002253- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2254 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2255 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002256
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002257- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002258 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2259 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2260
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002261- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2262 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2263 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2264 timeouts to work properly.
2265
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002266Library
2267-------
2268
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002269- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2270 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2271 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2272 future release.
2273
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002274- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2275 for querying platform dependent features.
2276
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002277- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002278
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002279- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2280 pickle protocol versions.
2281
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002282- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2283 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2284 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2285
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002286- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2287
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002288- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2289 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2290 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2291 modules.
2292
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002293- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2294 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2295 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2296
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002297- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2298 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2299
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002300- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2301 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2302 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2303
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002304- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002305 MS Office extensions.
2306
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002307- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2308 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2309
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002310- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2311 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2312
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002313- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2314 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2315 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2316 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2317 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2318 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2319
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002320- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2321 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2322 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002323
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002324- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2325 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2326 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2327
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002328- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2329
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002330- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2331 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2332 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2333
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002334Tools/Demos
2335-----------
2336
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002337- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2338 See the module docstring for details.
2339
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002340Build
2341-----
2342
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002343- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2344 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002345
2346C API
2347-----
2348
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002349- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2350
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002351- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2352 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2353 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2354
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002355- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2356 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002357
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002358 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2359 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2360 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002361
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002362- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002363 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2364
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002365- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2366 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2367 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002368
2369New platforms
2370-------------
2371
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002372None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002373
2374Tests
2375-----
2376
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002377- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2378 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002379
2380Windows
2381-------
2382
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002383- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2384 function.
2385
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002386- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2387 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002388
2389Mac
2390---
2391
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002392- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2393 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002394
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002395- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2396 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002397
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002398- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2399 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2400 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002401
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002402- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002403 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2404 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002405
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002406- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2407 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002408
2409
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002410What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2411=================================
2412
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002413*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002414
2415Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002416-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002417
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002418- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2419 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2420 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2421
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002422- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2423 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2424 (SF patch #664376.)
2425
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002426- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2427 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2428 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2429 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2430 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2431 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002432 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002433
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002434- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2435 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2436 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2437 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002438 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002439
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002440- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2441 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2442 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2443 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2444 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2445 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2446 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2447 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2448 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2449 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2450 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2451
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002452- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2453 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2454 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2455 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2456 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2457 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2458
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002459- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2460 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2461
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002462- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2463 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2464 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2465 case.)
2466
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002467- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2468 passed as unicode strings.
2469
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002470- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2471 See SF bug #683467.
2472
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002473- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2474 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2475
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002476- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2477
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002478- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2479
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002480- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2481 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2482 arguments.
2483
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002484- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2485 See SF bug #667147.
2486
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002487- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002488 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002489 See SF bug #676155.
2490
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002491- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002492 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002493 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2494 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2495 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2496 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2497 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2498 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002499
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002500Extension modules
2501-----------------
2502
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002503- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2504 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2505 tp_as_number pointer.
2506
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002507- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2508 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2509 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2510 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2511 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2512
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002513- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2514
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002515- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2516
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002517- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002518 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002519 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2520 patch #678531.)
2521
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002522- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2523 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2524
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002525- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2526 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2527
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002528- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2529
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002530- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2531 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2532 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2533
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002534- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2535
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002536- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2537 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2538
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002539- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002540
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002541- datetime changes:
2542
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002543 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2544
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002545 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2546 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2547 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2548 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2549 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2550 now.
2551
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002552 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002553 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2554 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002555
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002556 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002557 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002558 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2559 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2560 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2561 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002562
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002563 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2564 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2565 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002566 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2567
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002568 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2569 by a later example coded by Guido.
2570
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002571 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002572 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2573 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2574 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002575 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2576 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2577
2578 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2579 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2580 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2581 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2582 tzinfo subclass instance.
2583
2584 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2585 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2586 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2587 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2588 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2589 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2590 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2591 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002592
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002593 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2594 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2595 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2596 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2597 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002598 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2599
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002600 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002601
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002602 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2603 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2604 as a naive datetime object.
2605
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002606 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2607 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2608 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2609
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002610 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2611 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2612 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2613 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2614 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2615 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2616 comparison.
2617
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002618 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2619 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2620 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2621 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002622 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002623
2624 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002625
2626 and ::
2627
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002628 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2629
2630 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2631 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2632 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2633 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2634
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002635 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2636 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2637 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2638 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2639 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2640
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002641 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2642 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002643 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2644 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002645
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002646Library
2647-------
2648
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002649- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2650 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2651
2652- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2653 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2654 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2655 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2656 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2657 See PEP 307 for details.
2658
2659- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2660 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2661
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002662- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2663 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002664 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002665 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2666 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002667 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002668
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002669- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2670 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2671
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002672- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2673 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2674 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2675
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002676- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2677
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002678- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2679 exception.
2680
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002681- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2682 class.
2683
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002684- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2685 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2686 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2687
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002688- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2689 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2690
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002691- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002692 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2693 See SF bug #659228.
2694
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002695- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2696 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2697 See SF patch #651082.
2698
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002699- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002700
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002701- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2702 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2703
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002704- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002705 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002706
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002707- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2708 DOS paths from other platforms.
2709
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002710Tools/Demos
2711-----------
2712
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002713- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2714 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2715 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2716 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2717 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2718 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2719 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2720 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2721 example:
2722
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002723 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2724 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002725
2726 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2727
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002728
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002729Build
2730-----
2731
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002732- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2733 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2734 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002735 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2736
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002737 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2738
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002739- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2740 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2741 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2742 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2743 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2744 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2745 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2746 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2747 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2748
2749- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2750 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2751 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2752 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2753
2754- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2755 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2756
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002757C API
2758-----
2759
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002760- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2761 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002762
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002763- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2764 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2765 tp_as_number pointer.
2766
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002767- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2768 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2769 (SF #681367)
2770
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002771- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2772 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2773 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2774 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002775
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002776Tests
2777-----
2778
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002779- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002780 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2781 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2782 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2783 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2784 pydoc.)
2785
2786- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2787
2788- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002789
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002790Windows
2791-------
2792
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002793- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2794 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2795 time).
2796
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002797- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2798 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2799
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002800- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2801 release without strong cryptography.
2802
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002803- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002804 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002805
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002806- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2807 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2808
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002809Mac
2810---
2811
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002812- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2813 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002814
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002815- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2816 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2817 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002818
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002819- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2820 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002821
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002822- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2823 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2824 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2825 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002826
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002827- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002828 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2829 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2830 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002831
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002832
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002833What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002834=================================
2835
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002836*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002837
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002838Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002839--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002840
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002841- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2842
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002843- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2844 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002845 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002846 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002847 a different meaning than before.
2848
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002849- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002850 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002851 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002852
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002853- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002854 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002855 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002856
2857- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2858 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2859 and deallocation.
2860
2861- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2862 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2863
2864- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2865 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2866 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2867 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2868 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2869
2870- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2871 now detected by the garbage collector.
2872
2873- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2874 [SF bug 519621]
2875
2876- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2877 identifier.
2878
2879- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2880 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2881 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2882 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2883 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2884 [SF bug 563060]
2885
2886- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2887 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2888 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2889 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2890 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2891
2892- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2893 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2894 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2895
2896- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2897
2898- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2899 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2900 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2901 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2902 state of the slots would be lost.)
2903
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002904Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002905-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002906
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002907- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002908 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2909 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2910 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2911 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002912 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2913 Jython 2.1.
2914
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002915- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002916 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002917 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2918 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2919 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2920 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2921 these, see PEP 302.
2922
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002923- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2924 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2925 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2926
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002927- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2928 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2929 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2930
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002931- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2932 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2933 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2934
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002935- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2936 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2937 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2938 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2939 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2940 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2941 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2942 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2943 releases or implementations.
2944
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002945- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002946 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2947 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002948
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002949- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2950 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2951
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002952- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2953 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2954 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2955
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002956- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2957 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2958
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002959- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2960 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002961 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2962 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002963
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002964- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2965 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2966 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2967 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2968 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2969
2970 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2971 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2972 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2973 pattern.
2974
2975 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2976 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2977 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2978 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2979
2980 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2981 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2982 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2983 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2984 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2985 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2986
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002987- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2988 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2989 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2990 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2991 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2992 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2993 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2994 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002995
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002996- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2997 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2998 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2999 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3000 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003001 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3002 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3003 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3004 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3005 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3006 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3007 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003008
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003009- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3010 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3011
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003012- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3013 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3014 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3015 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3016 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3017 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3018 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3019 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3020 to Zack Weinberg!
3021
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003022- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3023 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3024 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3025 type. This has been fixed now.
3026
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003027- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3028 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3029 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3030
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003031- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3032 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3033 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3034 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3035 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3036 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3037 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3038 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003039 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003040
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003041- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3042 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3043 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003044
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003045- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3046 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3047 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3048 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3049 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3050 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3051 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3052 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003053 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003054 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3055 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3056
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003057- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3058 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3059 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3060 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3061 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3062 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3063 this.)
3064
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003065- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3066 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003067 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003068 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003069 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3070 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003071 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3072 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003073
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003074- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3075 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3076 currently running.
3077
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003078- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3079 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3080 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3081 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3082
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003083- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3084 as directory names.
3085
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003086- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3087 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3088
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003089- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3090 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3091
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003092- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003093 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3094 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003095
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003096- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3097 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3098 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3099 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3100 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3101
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003102- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3103 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3104 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3105 removed.
3106
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003107- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3108 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3109 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3110
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003111- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3112 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3113 to __debug__.
3114
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003115- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3116 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3117 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3118
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003119- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3120 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3121 deprecated now.
3122
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003123- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3124 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3125 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003126
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003127- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3128 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3129 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3130 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3131 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003132
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003133- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3134 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3135
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003136- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3137 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3138 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003139 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003140 is backward compatible.
3141
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003142- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3143 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3144 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3145 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3146 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3147
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003148- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3149 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3150 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3151 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3152 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3153 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003154
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003155- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3156 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3157
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003158- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3159 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3160
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003161- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3162 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3163 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3164 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3165 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3166
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003167- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3168 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3169 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3170
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003171- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003172 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3173
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003174- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3175 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3176 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003177
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003178- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3179 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3180
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003181- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3182 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3183 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3184
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003185- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3186
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003187Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003189
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003190- Added three operators to the operator module:
3191 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3192 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3193 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3194
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003195- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3196
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003197- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3198 archives.
3199
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003200- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3201 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3202 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3203
3204 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3205
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003206- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3207 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3208 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003209 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003210
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003211- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3212 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3213 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3214 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003215 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3216 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3217 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3218 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003219
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003220- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3221 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003222
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003223- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3224
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003225- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3226 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3227
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003228- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3229 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3230 supported.
3231
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003232- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3233
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003234- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3235 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003236
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003237- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3238 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3239
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003240- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3241
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003242- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3243 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3244
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003245- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3246 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3247 functions but callable type objects.
3248
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003249- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003250 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003251 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003252
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003253- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3254 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003255
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003256- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3257 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003258
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003259- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3260 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3261 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3262 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3263
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003264- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3265 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003266
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003267- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3268 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3269 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3270 and __imul__.
3271
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003272- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003273 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3274 is called.
3275
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003276- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3277 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3278 interpreter was compiled.
3279
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003280- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3281 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3282 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003283 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003284 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3285 1, not 2.
3286
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003287- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3288 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3289 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3290 limit.
3291
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003292- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3293 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3294 bug #623464.
3295
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003296- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3297 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3298 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3299 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3300
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003301Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003302-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003303
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003304- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3305
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003306- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3307 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3308 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3309 with Python 2.3a2.
3310
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003311- os.path exposes getctime.
3312
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003313- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003314 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003315 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003316 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003317 unit tests of floating point results.
3318
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003319- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3320 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3321 has been increased.
3322
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003323- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3324 executed.
3325
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003326- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3327 postinstallation script.
3328
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003329- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3330 test the current module.
3331
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003332- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003333 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3334 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3335 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3336 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3337
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003338- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003339 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003340 Ward's Optik package.
3341
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003342- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3343 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3344 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3345 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3346
3347- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3348 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003349 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003350
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003351- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3352 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3353 shelf are binary pickles.
3354
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003355- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3356 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3357
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003358- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3359 modules are iterators now.
3360
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003361- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3362 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3363 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3364 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3365 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3366 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003367
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003368- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3369 with their entity value.
3370
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003371- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3372
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003373- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3374 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003375
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003376- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3377 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003378 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003379
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003380- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3381 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3382 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3383 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3384 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3385 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3386 main():
3387
3388 import locale
3389 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3390
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003391- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3392 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3393
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003394- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3395 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3396 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3397 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3398 to the new standard.
3399
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003400- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3401 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3402 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3403 an extension to the database.
3404
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003405- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3406 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3407 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3408 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003409 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003410
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003411- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003412 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003413
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003414- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3415 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3416 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3417 bounded integers.
3418
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003419- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3420 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3421 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3422 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3423 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3424 in existence.
3425
3426 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3427 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3428 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3429 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3430 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3431 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3432
3433 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3434 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3435 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3436 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3437
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003438- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3439 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3440 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3441
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003442- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3443
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003444- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3445 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3446 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3447 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3448
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003449- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3450 argument.
3451
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003452- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3453 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3454 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3455 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3456 [SF patch 560794].
3457
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003458- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3459 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3460 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003461 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3462 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3463 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003464
3465- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3466 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003467
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003468- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3469 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3470 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3471 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003472
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003473- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3474 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3475 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3476 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3477 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3478
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003479- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003480
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003481- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3482
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003483- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3484 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3485 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3486 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3487 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3488 identical to None.
3489
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003490- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3491 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3492 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3493 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3494 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3495 results now.
3496
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003497- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3498 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3499
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003500- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3501 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3502 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3503 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3504 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3505 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3506 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3507 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3508
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003509- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3510
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003511- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3512 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3513
3514- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3515 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3516 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3517 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3518 and other systems.
3519
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003520- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3521 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3522 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3523 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 +00003524 work well with these.
3525
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003526- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3527
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003528- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003529 connections.
3530
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003531- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3532 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3533 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3534
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003535- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3536 sets
3537
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003538- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3539 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3540 name.
3541
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003542- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3543 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3544 passed in.
3545
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003546- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003547 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003548 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3549 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003550
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003551- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3552
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003553- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3554
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003555- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3556 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3557 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3558
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003559- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3560 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3561 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3562 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003563 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003564
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003565- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003566 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003567 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003568
3569- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3570 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3571 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3572
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003573- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003574 the value of its expression argument.
3575
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003576- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3577 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3578 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3579
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003580- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3581 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3582 skipstone browser was included.
3583
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003584- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3585 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3586
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003587Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003589
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003590- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3591 names in addition to accepting file names.
3592
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003593- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3594 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3595 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3596 still used and useful.)
3597
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003598- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3599 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3600 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3601 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003602
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003603- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3604 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3605 the generated binary.
3606
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003607Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003609
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003610- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3611
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003612- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3613 except in the hands of experts.
3614
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003615- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003616 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3617 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3618 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003619
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003620- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3621 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3622 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3623 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3624 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3625 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3626 builds.
3627
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003628- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3629 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3630 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3631 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3632 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3633 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3634 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3635 new type.
3636
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003637- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003638
3639 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3640 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3641 positive infinities.
3642
3643 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3644 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3645 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3646 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3647 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3648 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3649 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3650
3651 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3652
3653 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3654
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003655- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3656 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3657 size of the executable.
3658
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003659- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3660 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3661 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3662 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003663
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003664- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3665
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003666- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3667 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3668 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003669
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003670- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3671 well as Unix.
3672
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003673- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3674 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3675 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3676 modules in the README file for details.
3677
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003678C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003680
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003681- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3682 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003683 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003684 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003685 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003686
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003687- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3688 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3689 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3690 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3691 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3692 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003693 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003694 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3695 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3696 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3697 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3698 aligned.)
3699
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003700- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3701 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3702 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3703
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003704- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3705 level.
3706
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003707- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3708 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3709 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3710 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3711 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3712
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003713- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3714 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3715 code.
3716
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003717- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3718 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3719 adjusting for negative indices.
3720
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003721- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3722 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3723 object.
3724
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003725- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3726 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3727 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3728
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003729- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3730 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003731
3732- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3733
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003734- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3735 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3736 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3737 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3738
3739- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3740
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003741- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003742
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003743- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003744 without going through the buffer API.
3745
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003747
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003748- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3749 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3750 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3751 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3752
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003753- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3754 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3755
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003756- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003757 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3758
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003759New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003761
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003762- OpenVMS is now supported.
3763
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003764- AtheOS is now supported.
3765
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003766- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3767
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003768- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3769
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003770Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771-----
3772
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003773- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3774 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3775 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003776
3777Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003779
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003780- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3781 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3782 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3783 bugs.
3784 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003785 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003786 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3787 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003788 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003789
3790- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003791 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003792
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003793- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3794 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3795
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003796- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3797 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003798 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003799 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3800
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003801- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3802 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3803 use files" uninstall option).
3804
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003805- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3806
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003807- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3808 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3809
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003810- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3811 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3812 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3813
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003814- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3815 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3816 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3817 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3818 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003819 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3820 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3821 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003822
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003823- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003824 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003825 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3826 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3827 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3828 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3829 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3830 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3831 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3832 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3833 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3834 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3835 work around.
3836
3837- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3838 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3839 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3840 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3841 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3842 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3843 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3844 specified with O_CREAT too).
3845
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003846Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003847----
3848
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003849- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003850
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003851- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3852 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3853 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3854
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003855- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3856 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3857 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3858
3859- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3860 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3861 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3862 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3863 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3864 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3865 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3866 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003867
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003868- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3869 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3870 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003871
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003872- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3873 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3874 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3875 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3876 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003877
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003878- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3879 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3880 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003881
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003882- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3883 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003884
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003885- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3886 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3887 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3888 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3889 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003890
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003891- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3892 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3893 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3894
3895- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3896 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3897 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003899- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3900 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3901 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3902 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003903 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003904
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003905- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3906 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003907
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003908- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3909 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003910
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003911- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003912 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003913 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3914 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003915
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003916
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003917What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003918===============================
3919
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3921
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003922Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003924
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003925- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3926 with a custom metaclass.
3927
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003928Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003930
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003931- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3932 are proxies.
3933
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003934Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003935-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003936
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003937- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3938 very short strings.
3939
3940- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3941 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3942 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3943 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3944 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3945
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003946Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003947-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003948
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003949- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3950 close or delete time).
3951
3952- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3953 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3954
3955- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3956
3957- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003958 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003959
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003960Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003962
3963Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003964-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003965
3966C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003968
3969New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003970-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003971
3972Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003973-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003974
3975Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003976-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003977
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003978- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3979
3980- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3981 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3982
3983- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3984 deleted at process exit time.
3985
3986- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3987 in backslash.
3988
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003989Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003991
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003992- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3993 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3994 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3995
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003996
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003997What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003998===========================
3999
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4001
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004002Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004004
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004005- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4006 been extensively updated. See
4007
4008 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4009
4010 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4011
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004012- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4013 deleted!
4014
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004015- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4016 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4017 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4018 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4019 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4020
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004021- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4022
4023 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4024 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4025
4026 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4027 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4028 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4029 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4030 supported anyway.
4031
4032 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4033 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4034
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004035- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4036 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4037 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4038 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4039 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004040
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004041- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4042 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4043 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4044
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004045Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004046-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004047
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004048- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4049 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4050 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4051 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4052 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4053 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004054 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4055 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4056 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4057 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004058
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004059- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4060 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4061 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4062
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004063Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004064-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004065
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004066- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4067
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004068Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004069-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004070
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004071- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4072 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4073 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4074 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4075 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4076 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4077
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004078- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4079
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004080- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4081
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004082- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4083
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004084- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4085 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4086 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4087
4088- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4089
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004090Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004091-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004092
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004093- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4094 off a search on Google.
4095
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004096Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004098
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004099- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4100 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4101 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4102 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4103 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4104 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4105 other platforms should do likewise.
4106
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004107- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4108 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4109 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4110
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004111C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004112-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004113
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004114- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4115 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4116 producing key-value pairs.
4117
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004118- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004119 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004120 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4121 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4122 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4123 previously went unchallenged.
4124
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004125New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004126-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004127
4128Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004130
4131Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004133
4134Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004136
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004137- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4138 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004139
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004140- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4141 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4142 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4143 home.
4144
4145
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004146What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004147===========================
4148
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4150
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004151Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004153
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004154- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4155 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004156
4157 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004158 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004159
4160 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4161 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004162 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004163 This needs to be documented.
4164
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004165- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4166 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4167
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004168- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4169 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4170 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4171
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004172- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4173 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4174
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004175- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4176 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4177 class forbids it).
4178
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004179- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4180 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4181 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4182
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004183- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4184
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004185Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004186-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004187
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004188- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4189 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004190 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004191
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004192- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4193 (like 1 + '').
4194
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004195Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004197
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004198- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4199 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4200 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4201 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004202 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004203 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4204
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004205- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4206 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4207 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4208 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4209
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004210- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4211 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004212 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4213 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4214 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004215
4216- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4217 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004218
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004219- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4220 bytes on its input.
4221
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004222Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004224
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004225- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004226 convenience function.
4227
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004228- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4229 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4230 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004231 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4232 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4233 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4234 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4235 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4236 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004237
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004238- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4239 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4240 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4241 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4242
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004243- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4244 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4245 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4246
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004247- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4248 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4249 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4250 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4251
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004252- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4253 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004254 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004255 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4256 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4257 new -l and -e options.
4258
4259- statcache is now deprecated.
4260
4261- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4262 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004264 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4265 time properly taken into account.
4266
4267- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4268 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4269 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4270 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4271
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004272Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004274
4275Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004277
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004278- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4279 is built with libdb3 if available.
4280
4281- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4282
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004283C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004285
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004286- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4287 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4288 PySequence_Size().
4289
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004290- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4291
4292- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4293 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4294 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4295
4296- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4297 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4298
4299- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4300 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4301
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004302New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004303-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004304
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004305- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4306 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4307
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004308- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4309 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4310
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004311- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004313Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004315
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004316- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4317 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4318
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004319Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004321
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004322Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004323----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004324
4325- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4326 removed completely in the next release.
4327
4328- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4329 OSX.
4330
4331- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4332 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4333
4334- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004336
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004337What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004338===========================
4339
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4341
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004342Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004344
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004345- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004346 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004347 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004348 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4349 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004350 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4351 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004352 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4353 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004354
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004355- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4356 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4357
4358- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4359 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4360
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004361Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004363
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004364- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4365 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4366 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4367 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4368 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4369 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4370 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4371 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4372
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004373- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4374 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4375 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4376 example).
4377
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004378- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004379 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004380 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004381 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004382
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004383- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4384 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4385 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004386 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004387
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004388- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4389 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4390 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4391 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4392 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4393 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4394
4395 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4396
4397 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4398
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004399Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004400-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004401
4402- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4403
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004404- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4405
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004406- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4407 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004408
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004409- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4410 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4411 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4412 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4413 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4414 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004415 attributes.
4416
4417- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4418 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4419 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004420
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004421- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4422 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4423 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004424
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004425- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4426 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4427 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004428 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4429 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4430
4431- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4432 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004433
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004434Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004436
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004437- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4438 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4439
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004440- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4441 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4442 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4443 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4444
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004445- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4446 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4447 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4448 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4449
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004450 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4451 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4452 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4453 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4454 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4455 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4456 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4457 without losing information).
4458
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004459- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004460 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4461 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4462 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4463 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4464 module).
4465
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004466 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004467 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4468 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4469 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4470 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004471
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004472- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004473 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4474 encoding.
4475
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004476- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4477 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4478
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004480 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4481
4482- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4483 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4484 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4485 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4486
4487- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4488
4489- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4490 ON, and OFF.
4491
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004492- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4493 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4494
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004495Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004497
4498- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4499 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4500 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004501
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004502- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4503 been added: -X and -E.
4504
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004505Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004507
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004508- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4509 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4510
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004511C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004513
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004514- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4515 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4516 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4517 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4518 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4519
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004520- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4521 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4522 as long) arguments.
4523
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004524- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4525 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4526 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4527 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4528 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4529 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4530
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004531- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4532 input.
4533
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004534New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004536
4537Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004538-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004539
4540Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004542
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004543- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4544 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4545 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4546
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004547- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4548 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4549 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004550 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004551
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4553 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4554 import signal
4555 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004556
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004557 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004558 while 1:
4559 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004560 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004561 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4562 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4563 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4564 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004565
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004566
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004567What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4568===========================
4569
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4571
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004572Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004573--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004574
4575- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4576 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4577 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4578
4579- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4580 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4581 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4582 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4583 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4584 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4585 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004586
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004587- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004588 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004589 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4590 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4591 associate a docstring with a property.
4592
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004593- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4594 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4595 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4596 other built-in object types.
4597
4598- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4599 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4600 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4601 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4602 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4603
4604- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4605 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4606
4607- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4608 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004609 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004610 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4611 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4612 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4613 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4614 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4615
4616- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4617 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4618 class.
4619
4620- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4621 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4622 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4623 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4624
4625- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4626 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4627 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4628 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4629
4630- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4631 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4632
4633- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4634 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4635 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4636 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4637 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004638 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004639 with the same value as s.
4640
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004641- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4642
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004643Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004644----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004645
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004646- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4647
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004648- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4649 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4650 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4651 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4652 objects.
4653
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004654- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4655 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004656 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4657 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4658
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004659- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4660 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4661 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4662
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004663Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004664-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004665
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004666- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4667 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4668 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4669 by the instances.
4670
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004671- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4672 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4673 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4674
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004675- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4676 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4677 before the entire comparison is complete.
4678
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004679- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4680 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4681 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4682
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004683- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4684 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4685 getwriter().
4686
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004687- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4688 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4689
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004690- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004691 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4692 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4693
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004694- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4695 iterable object.
4696
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004697- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4698 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004699
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004700- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4701 authentication.
4702
4703- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4704 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004705
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004706- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004707 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4708 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4709 a sample driver.)
4710
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004711Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004713
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004714- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4715 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4716 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4717 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4718 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4719 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4720 kernel has large file support.
4721
4722- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4723 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4724 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4725 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4726 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4727
4728- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4729 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4730 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4731
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004732C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004733-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004734
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004735- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4736 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4737
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004738New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004739-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004740
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004741- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4742 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4743
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004744Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004746
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004747- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4748 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4749 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4750 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4751 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4752
4753- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4754 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4755 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4756 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4757
4758- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4759 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4760
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004761Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004763
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004764- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004765 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4766 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004767
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004768
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004769What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4770===========================
4771
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004772*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4773
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004774Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004776
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004777- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4778 big to represent as a C double.
4779
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004780- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4781 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4782 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4783 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4784 restriction).
4785
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004786- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4787 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4788 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4789 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4790 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4791
4792 >>> dir([])
4793 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4794 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4795 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4796 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4797 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4798 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4799 'reverse', 'sort']
4800
4801 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4802
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004803- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004804 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4805 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4806 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4807 OverflowError exception.
4808
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004809- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004810 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004811 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4812 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4813 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4814 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4815 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004816 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004817 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4818 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4819
4820 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4821 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4822 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4823 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004824
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004825- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004826 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4827 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4828 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4829 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4830 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4831 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4832 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4833 once it is created.
4834
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004835- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4836 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4837 (key, value) pairs.
4838
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004839- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004840 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4841 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4842
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004843- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4844 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4845 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4846 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4847 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004848
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004849- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004850 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4851 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4852
4853 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004855- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004856 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4857
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004858Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004859-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004860
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004861- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004862 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4863 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004864
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004865- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4866 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4867 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4868 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4869 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4870 in this area anymore).
4871
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004872- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4873 threading.Timer.
4874
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004875- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4876 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4877
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004878- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004879 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4880
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004881- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004882 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4883 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4884 converted to Python longs.
4885
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004886- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004887 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4888
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004889- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4890 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4891 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4892
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004893Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004894-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004895
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004896- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4897 division operators as per PEP 238.
4898
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004899Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004901
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004902- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4903 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4904 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4905 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4906
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004907C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004908-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004909
4910- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004911
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004912- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4913 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004914 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004915
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004916 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4917 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004918 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004919 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004920
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004921- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004922 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4923 module:
4924
4925 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004926
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004927 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4928 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004929
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004930 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4931 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004932
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004933 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4934
4935 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4936
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004937- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004938 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4939 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4940 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004941
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004942New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004944
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004945- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4946 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4947 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4948 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4949 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004950
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004951Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004952-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004953
4954Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004955-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004956
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004957- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4958 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4959 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4960 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004961 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4962 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4963 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4964 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4965 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004966
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004967- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004968 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4969
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004970
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004971What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4972===========================
4973
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4975
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004976Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004977-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004978
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004979- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4980 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4981
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004982- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4983 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4984 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004985
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004986- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4987 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4988 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4989 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004990
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004991- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4992
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004994
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004995Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004996-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004997
4998- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004999 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005000 the module docstring for details.
5001
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005002Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005003-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005004
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005005- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005006 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5007 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5008 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005009
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005010- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5011 Nick Mathewson.
5012
5013Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005014----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005015
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005016- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5017 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5018 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5019 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5020 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5021 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5022 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5023 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5024
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005025- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5026 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5027 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5028 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5029
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005030- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5031 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5032 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5033 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5034 come a long way).
5035
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005036- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5037 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5038 write filters for these warnings).
5039
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005040- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5041 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5042 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5043 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5044 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5045
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005046- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5047 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5048 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5049 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5050 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5051 older distribution.
5052
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005053Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005054-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005055
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005056- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5057 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005058 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005059
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005060- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5061 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5062 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5063
5064- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5065
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005066- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5067
5068- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5069
5070- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5071
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005072- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005073
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005074- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5075
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005076New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005077-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005078
5079C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005080-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005081
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005082- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5083 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5084 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5085 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5086 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5087 against buffer overruns.
5088
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005089- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005090 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5091 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005092 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5093 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5094 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5095
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005096- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5097 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5098 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5099 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5100 deprecated.
5101
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005102Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005103-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005104
5105- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5106 relevant is found.
5107
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005108
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005109What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005110===========================
5111
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005112*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5113
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005114Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005116
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005117- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5118 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5119 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5120 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5121 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5122 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5123 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5124 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005125 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005126 repaired.
5127
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005128- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005129 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005130 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5131 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5132 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5133 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5134 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5135 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5136 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5137 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5138
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005139- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5140 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5141 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5142 leading BMO character).
5143
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005144- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5145 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5146 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5147
5148 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5149 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5150 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005151
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005152 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5153 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5154 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5155 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5156 for various simple to use conversions.
5157
5158 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5159 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005161 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5162 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5163 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5164 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5165 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5166 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5167 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5168 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5169 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5170 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5171 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5172 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5173 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5174 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5175 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005176
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005177- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5178 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5179 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005180 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005181 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005182
5183 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005184 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5185 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5186 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5187 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5188 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005189 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5190 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005191
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005192 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5193 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5194 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005195 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005196
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005197- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5198 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5199 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5200 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5201 floating arithmetic,
5202
5203 x = 9007199254740992.0
5204 print long(x)
5205
5206 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5207 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5208 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5209 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5210 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5211 functions are of good quality).
5212
5213 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5214 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5215 algorithms to break.
5216
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005217- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5218 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5219 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5220 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5221 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5222 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5223 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5224 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5225 order.
5226
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005227- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5228 operation along the most common code paths.
5229
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005230- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5231 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5232
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005233- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5234 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5235 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5236 {}.update(UserDict())
5237
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005238- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5239 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5240 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5241 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5242 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5243 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5244 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5245 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5246
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005247- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005248 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005249
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005250 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005251 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5252 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005253 join() method of strings
5254 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005255 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5256 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005257 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005258 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005259
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005260- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5261 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5262
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005263- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5264 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5265
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005266- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5267 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5268 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5269 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5270
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005271- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5272 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005273 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005274 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5275 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005276
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005277- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5278
5279
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005280Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005281-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005282
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005283- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005284 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005285 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5286 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5287
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005288- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5289 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5290
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005291- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5292 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5293 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5294 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5295
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005296- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5297 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5298 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5299
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005300- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5301
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005302- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5303
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005304- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5305 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5306 that are still imported into string.py).
5307
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005308- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5309
5310- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5311 Now it does.
5312
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005313- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5314
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005315- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5316 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5317 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5318 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5319 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005320 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5321 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005322
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005323- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5324 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5325 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5326 'help(object)'.
5327
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005328Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005329-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005330
5331- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005332 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005333 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5334 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5335
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005336- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005337 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5338 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005339
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005340C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005341-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005342
5343- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5344 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005345
5346----
5347
5348**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**