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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000015- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
16 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
17 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000018
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000019- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
20 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
21
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000022- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
23
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000024- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
25 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
26
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000027- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
28
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000029- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
30
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000031- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
32 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
33
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000034- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
35 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
36 Fixes bug #858016 .
37
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000038- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
39 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
40 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
41
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000042- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
43 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
44 improves their performance (about 35%).
45
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000046- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
47 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
48 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
49
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000050- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
51 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
52 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
53 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
54
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000055- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
56 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
57 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
58 length is not known).
59
60- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
61 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000062 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
63 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000064 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
65
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000066- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
67 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
68
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000069- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
70 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
71 keyword arguments.
72
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000073- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
74 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
75 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
76
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000077- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
78 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
79 cases.
80
81- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
82 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
83 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
84 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
85 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
86 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
87 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
88 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
89 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
90 a release build.
91
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000092- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
93 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
94
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000095- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000096 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000097
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000098- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
99 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
100 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
101 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
102 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
103 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
104 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
105 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
106 destroyed.
107
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000108- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
109 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
110 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
111 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
112 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
113 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
114 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
115 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
116
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000117- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
118 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
119 character other than a space.
120
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000121- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
122 by the function object or by the method object, the function
123 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
124 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
125 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
126 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
127 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
128 attributes with the same name.
129
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000130- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
131 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
132 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
133 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
134 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
135 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
136 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
137 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
138 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
139 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
140 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
141 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
142 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
143 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000144
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000145- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
146 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
147 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
148 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
149 This has been repaired.
150
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000151- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
152
153- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
154
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000155- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
156 over a sequence.
157
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000158- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000159 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000160
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000161- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
162
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000163- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
164 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
165 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
166 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
167 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
168 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
169 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
170 records with equal keys is unchanged).
171
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000172- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
173 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
174 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
175
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000176- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
177 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
178 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
179 freelist.
180
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000181- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
182 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
183
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000184- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
185 number.
186
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000187- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
188 a TypeError exception.
189
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000190- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
191 820195.
192
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000193- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
194 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
195 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
196
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000197- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
198 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
199 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000200
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000201- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
202 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
203 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
204
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000205- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
206 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000207 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000208
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000209- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000210 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
211 the first call.
212
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000213
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000214Extension modules
215-----------------
216
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000217- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
218
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000219- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
220
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000221- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
222 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
223
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000224- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
225 fewer false positives.
226
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000227- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
228 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
229
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000230- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
231 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
232
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000233- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
234 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000235 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
236 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
237 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000238
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000239- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
240 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
241 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
242 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
243
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000244- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
245 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
246 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
247 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
248 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
249 #897625.
250
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000251- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
252 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
253
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000254- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
255 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
256 and pops on either side of the deque.
257
258- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
259 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
260
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000261- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
262 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
263 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
264 other functions that expect a function argument.
265
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000266- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
267
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000268- os.getsid was added.
269
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000270- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
271 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
272 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
273
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000274- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
275
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000276- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
277
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000278- readline.clear_history was added.
279
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000280- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
281
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000282- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
283
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000284- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
285
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000286- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
287
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000288- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
289
290- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
291
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000292- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
293
294- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
295
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000296- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
297 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
298 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
299
300- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
301 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
302 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
303 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
304 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
305 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
306 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
307
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000308- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
309 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
310 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
311 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000312
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000313- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
314 iterators from a single iterable.
315
316- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
317 of raising a TypeError exception.
318
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000319- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
320 as parameter.
321
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000322Library
323-------
324
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000325- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
326
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000327- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
328 module.
329
Martin v. Löwiseac324b2004-06-03 09:18:35 +0000330- asyncore.loop now has repeat count parameter that defaults to infinity.
331
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000332- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
333 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
334 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
335
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000336- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
337 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
338 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
339
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000340- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
341
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000342- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
343
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000344- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
345 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
346
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000347- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
348 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
349 type pattern with the same value exists.
350
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000351- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
352 when run from the command prompt).
353
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000354- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
355 not taken into consideration when caching value.
356
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000357- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
358 default sort).
359
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000360- Added global runctx function to profile module
361
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000362- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
363
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000364- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
365
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000366- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
367
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000368- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
369 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
370 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
371 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
372 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
373 accordingly.
374
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000375- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
376 decoding standards.
377
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000378- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
379 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
380 called for all requests.
381
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000382- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
383 they are passed to the compiler.
384
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000385- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
386 indent, width and depth.
387
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000388- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
389 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
390
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000391- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
392 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
393
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000394- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
395
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000396- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
397
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000398- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
399
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000400- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
401 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
402
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000403- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
404 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000405
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000406- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
407 a string).
408
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000409- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
410
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000411- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
412
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000413- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
414
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000415- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
416
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000417- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
418 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
419 list of fieldnames.
420
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000421- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
422 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
423
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000424- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
425
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000426- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
427 empty lists.
428
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000429- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
430 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
431 and shelves.
432
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000433- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
434 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
435
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000436- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000437 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
438 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000439
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000440- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
441 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000442 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000443
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000444- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000445 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
446 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
447
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000448- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
449 and removed in Py2.4.
450
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000451- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
452
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000453- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
454
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000455Tools/Demos
456-----------
457
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000458- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
459 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
460
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000461- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
462
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000463- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
464 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
465 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
466 destination in situations where both files are given.
467
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000468- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
469 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
470 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
471 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
472
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000473- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
474
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000475- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
476 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
477 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
478 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
479 now.
480
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000481- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
482 in effect
483
484- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
485 C-c C-h
486
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000487- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
488 -d option was given.
489
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000490Build
491-----
492
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000493- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
494 on AMD64.
495
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000496- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
497 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
498
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000499- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
500 removed.
501
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000502- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
503 supported (see PEP 11).
504
505- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
506
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000507- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
508
509- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
510 (see PEP 11).
511
512- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
513 sizeof(char) must be 1.
514
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000515C API
516-----
517
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000518- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
519 generator objects.
520
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000521- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
522 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000523 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
524 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000525
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000526- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
527 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
528
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000529- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
530 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
531 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
532 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
533 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
534
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000535- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
536 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
537 about 10% faster.
538
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000539- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
540 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
541
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000542- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
543 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
544 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
545 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
546
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000547New platforms
548-------------
549
550Tests
551-----
552
553Windows
554-------
555
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000556- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
557 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
558 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
559 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
560
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000561- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
562 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
563 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
564
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000565Mac
566----
567
568
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000569What's New in Python 2.3 final?
570===============================
571
572*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
573
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000574IDLE
575----
576
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000577- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
578 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
579 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
580 context-menu actions.
581
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000582- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
583 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
584 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
585 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
586 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
587 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
588 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
589 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
590 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
591
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000592
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000593What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
594=============================================
595
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000596*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000597
598Core and builtins
599-----------------
600
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000601- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000602 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000603 comment at the end are still unsupported.
604
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000605Extension modules
606-----------------
607
608- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
609 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
610 than once. This has been fixed.
611
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000612- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
613 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
614 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
615 call.
616
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000617- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
618
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000619Library
620-------
621
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000622- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
623 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
624
625- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
626 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
627 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
628 restored.
629
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000630IDLE
631----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000632
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000633- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000634
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000635Build
636-----
637
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000638- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
639 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
640
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000641C API
642-----
643
644Windows
645-------
646
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000647- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
648 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
649
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000650- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
651
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000652Mac
653---
654
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000655- Various fixes to pimp.
656
657- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
658
659- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
660 more problems than it solves.
661
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000662
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000663What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
664=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000665
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000666*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
667
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000668Core and builtins
669-----------------
670
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000671- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
672 by sys.setcheckinterval().
673
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000674- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
675 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000676 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000677
678- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
679 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
680 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000681 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000682
683- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
684 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000685
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000686- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
687 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
688 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
689
690- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000691 770247.
692
693- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000694
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000695Extension modules
696-----------------
697
698- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
699 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
700
701- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
702
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000703- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
704
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000705- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
706 contained within the _strptime module.
707
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000708- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
709 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
710
711- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000712 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
713
714- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
715 the find_class attribute, if present.
716
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000717- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000718
719 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
720 (SF bug 763298).
721
722 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000723 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
724 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
725 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000726
727 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
728
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000729Library
730-------
731
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000732- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
733
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000734- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
735 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
736 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
737 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
738 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
739 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
740 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
741 or Tester().
742
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000743- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
744 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
745 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
746 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
747 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
748 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
749 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
750 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
751 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000752
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000753 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000754
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000755- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
756 weren't before was an oversight.
757
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000758- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
759 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
760
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000761- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
762 when there are no lines.
763
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000764- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
765 which could occur with Tk 8.4
766
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000767- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
768 to child processes.
769
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000770- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
771
772- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
773
774- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
775 xmlrpclib.
776
777- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
778 responses.
779
780- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
781 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
782
783- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
784 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
785 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
786
787- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
788 used as patterns.
789
790- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
791 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
792 than Tk 8.3.
793
794- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
795
796- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000797
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000798Tools/Demos
799-----------
800
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000801- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
802
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000803- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
804
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000805- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000806
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000807Build
808-----
809
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000810- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
811
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000812- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
813
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000814- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
815 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000816
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000817- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
818 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
819 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000820
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000821C API
822-----
823
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000824- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
825 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
826
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000827Windows
828-------
829
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000830- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
831 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
832 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
833 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
834 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
835 Python exception ::
836
837 thread.error: can't start new thread
838
839 is raised now.
840
841- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
842 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
843 instead of from DLL teardown.
844
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000845Mac
846---
847
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000848- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000849 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000850 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
851 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
852 the executable in the bundle.
853
854- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000855
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000856- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
857
858- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
859 on Panther.
860
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000861What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
862================================
863
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000864*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000865
866Core and builtins
867-----------------
868
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000869- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
870 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
871 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
872 with the -i option.
873
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000874- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
875 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
876
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000877- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
878 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
879
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000880- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
881 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
882 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
883 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
884 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
885 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
886 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
887 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
888 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
889 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
890 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
891 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
892 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000893
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000894- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
895 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
896 embedded in a lambda expression.
897
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000898- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
899 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
900 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
901 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
902 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
903
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000904- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
905 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
906 matches the restriction on classic classes.
907
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000908- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
909 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
910
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000911- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
912 It's writable again.
913
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000914- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
915 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
916 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000917 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000918
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000919- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
920 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
921 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
922
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000923Extension modules
924-----------------
925
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000926- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
927 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
928
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000929- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
930 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
931 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
932 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
933
934- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
935 collection.
936
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000937- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
938 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
939 unique within a single program run.
940
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000941- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
942 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
943
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000944- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
945 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
946
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000947- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
948 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000949
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000950- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
951
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000952- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
953 Fixes SF bug #730685.
954
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000955- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
956 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
957 for many BSD-derived systems.
958
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000959
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000960Library
961-------
962
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000963- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
964 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
965 primary ones:
966
967 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
968 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
969 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
970
971 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
972 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
973 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
974 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
975 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
976 framework features (which doctest lacks).
977
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000978- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
979 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
980 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
981 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
982 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
983 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
984 argument.
985
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000986- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
987 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
988 in the archive.
989
990- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
991 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
992
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000993- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
994 569574).
995
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000996- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
997 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
998 no more.
999
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001000- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1001 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1002 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1003 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1004 code coverage.
1005
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001006- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1007 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1008 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001009 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1010 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001011
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001012- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1013 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1014 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001015 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001016
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001017- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1018
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001019- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1020 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1021 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1022 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1023
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001024- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1025 handling.
1026
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001027- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1028 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1029
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001030- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1031 in socket.py.
1032
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001033- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1034
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001035- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1036 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1037 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1038 opener with proxy support.
1039
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001040- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1041
1042- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1043
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001044Tools/Demos
1045-----------
1046
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001047- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1048
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001049- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1050
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001051- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1052 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001053
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001054- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1055 files.
1056
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001057Build
1058-----
1059
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001060- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001061 different root directory.
1062
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001063C API
1064-----
1065
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001066- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1067 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1068 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1069 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1070 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1071 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1072 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1073 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1074 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1075 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1076
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001077- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1078 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1079 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1080 from Python.
1081
1082
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001083New platforms
1084-------------
1085
1086None this time.
1087
1088Tests
1089-----
1090
1091- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1092 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1093
1094Windows
1095-------
1096
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001097- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1098
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001099- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1100 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1101 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1102 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1103 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1104 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1105 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1106 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1107 that's what it's for.
1108
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001109Mac
1110---
1111
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001112- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1113 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1114 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1115 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001116- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1117 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1118- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001119
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001120SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1121------------------------------------
1122
1123430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1124598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1125622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1126661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1127683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1128697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1129713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1130724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1131727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1132729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1133730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1134731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1135732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1136733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1137735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1138740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1139744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1140745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1141747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1142749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1143751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1144753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1145755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1146757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1147760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1148
1149
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001150What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1151================================
1152
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001153*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001154
1155Core and builtins
1156-----------------
1157
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001158- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1159 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1160
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001161- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1162 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1163 and cannot be strings).
1164
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001165- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1166 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1167 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1168 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1169
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001170- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1171 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1172 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1173 Python itself.
1174
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001175- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1176 the referenced object, if it has one.
1177
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001178- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1179 the thread started at
1180 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1181
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001182- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1183 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1184 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1185 placed on a list index.
1186
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001187- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1188 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1189 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1190 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1191
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001192- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1193 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1194 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1195 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1196 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1197 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1198 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1199
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001200- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1201 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1202 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1203 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1204 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1205
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001206- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1207 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001208
1209- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1210 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1211 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1212 #693195.)
1213
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001214- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1215 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001216
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001217- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001218 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001219 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1220 interpreter executions, would fail.
1221
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001222- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001223 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001224 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001225
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001226Extension modules
1227-----------------
1228
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001229- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1230 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1231 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1232 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1233
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001234- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1235 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1236
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001237- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1238 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1239 and Greg Chapman.)
1240
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001241- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1242 recursively.
1243
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001244- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001245 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1246 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1247 leaks.
1248
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001249- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1250
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001251- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1252 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1253 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1254 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1255 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1256 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1257 #705836.
1258
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001259- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001260 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1261
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001262- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1263 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1264 See SF bug #692416.
1265
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001266- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1267 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1268
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001269- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1270 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1271 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001272
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001273- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001274 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1275 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1276
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001277- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1278 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1279 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1280 timeouts to work properly.
1281
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001282Library
1283-------
1284
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001285- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1286 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1287 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1288 future release.
1289
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001290- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1291 for querying platform dependent features.
1292
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001293- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001294
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001295- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1296 pickle protocol versions.
1297
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001298- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1299 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1300 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1301
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001302- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1303
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001304- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1305 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1306 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1307 modules.
1308
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001309- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1310 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1311 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1312
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001313- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1314 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1315
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001316- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1317 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1318 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1319
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001320- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001321 MS Office extensions.
1322
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001323- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1324 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1325
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001326- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1327 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1328
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001329- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1330 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1331 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1332 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1333 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1334 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1335
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001336- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1337 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1338 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001339
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001340- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1341 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1342 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1343
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001344- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1345
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001346- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1347 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1348 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1349
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001350Tools/Demos
1351-----------
1352
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001353- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1354 See the module docstring for details.
1355
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001356Build
1357-----
1358
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001359- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1360 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001361
1362C API
1363-----
1364
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001365- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1366
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001367- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1368 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1369 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1370
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001371- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1372 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001373
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001374 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1375 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1376 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001377
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001378- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001379 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1380
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001381- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1382 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1383 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001384
1385New platforms
1386-------------
1387
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001388None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001389
1390Tests
1391-----
1392
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001393- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1394 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001395
1396Windows
1397-------
1398
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001399- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1400 function.
1401
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001402- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1403 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001404
1405Mac
1406---
1407
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001408- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1409 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001410
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001411- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1412 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001413
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001414- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1415 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1416 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001417
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001418- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001419 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1420 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001421
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001422- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1423 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001424
1425
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001426What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1427=================================
1428
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001429*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001430
1431Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001432-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001433
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001434- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1435 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1436 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1437
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001438- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1439 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1440 (SF patch #664376.)
1441
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001442- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1443 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1444 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1445 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1446 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1447 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001448 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001449
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001450- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1451 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1452 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1453 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001454 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001455
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001456- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1457 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1458 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1459 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1460 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1461 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1462 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1463 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1464 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1465 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1466 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1467
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001468- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1469 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1470 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1471 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1472 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1473 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1474
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001475- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1476 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1477
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001478- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1479 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1480 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1481 case.)
1482
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001483- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1484 passed as unicode strings.
1485
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001486- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1487 See SF bug #683467.
1488
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001489- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1490 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1491
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001492- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1493
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001494- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1495
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001496- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1497 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1498 arguments.
1499
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001500- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1501 See SF bug #667147.
1502
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001503- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001504 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001505 See SF bug #676155.
1506
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001507- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001508 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001509 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1510 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1511 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1512 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1513 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1514 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001515
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001516Extension modules
1517-----------------
1518
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001519- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1520 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1521 tp_as_number pointer.
1522
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001523- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1524 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1525 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1526 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1527 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1528
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001529- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1530
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001531- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1532
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001533- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001534 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001535 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1536 patch #678531.)
1537
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001538- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1539 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1540
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001541- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1542 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1543
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001544- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1545
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001546- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1547 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1548 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1549
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001550- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1551
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001552- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1553 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1554
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001555- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001556
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001557- datetime changes:
1558
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001559 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1560
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001561 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1562 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1563 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1564 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1565 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1566 now.
1567
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001568 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001569 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1570 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001571
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001572 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001573 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001574 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1575 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1576 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1577 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001578
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001579 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1580 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1581 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001582 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1583
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001584 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1585 by a later example coded by Guido.
1586
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001587 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001588 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1589 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1590 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001591 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1592 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1593
1594 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1595 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1596 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1597 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1598 tzinfo subclass instance.
1599
1600 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1601 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1602 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1603 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1604 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1605 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1606 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1607 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001608
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001609 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1610 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1611 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1612 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1613 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001614 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1615
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001616 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001617
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001618 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1619 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1620 as a naive datetime object.
1621
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001622 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1623 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1624 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1625
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001626 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1627 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1628 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1629 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1630 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1631 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1632 comparison.
1633
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001634 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1635 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1636 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1637 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001638 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001639
1640 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001641
1642 and ::
1643
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001644 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1645
1646 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1647 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1648 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1649 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1650
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001651 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1652 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1653 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1654 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1655 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1656
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001657 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1658 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001659 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1660 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001661
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001662Library
1663-------
1664
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001665- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1666 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1667
1668- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1669 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1670 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1671 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1672 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1673 See PEP 307 for details.
1674
1675- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1676 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1677
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001678- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1679 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001680 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001681 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1682 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001683 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001684
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001685- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1686 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1687
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001688- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1689 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1690 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1691
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001692- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1693
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001694- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1695 exception.
1696
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001697- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1698 class.
1699
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001700- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1701 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1702 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1703
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001704- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1705 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1706
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001707- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001708 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1709 See SF bug #659228.
1710
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001711- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1712 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1713 See SF patch #651082.
1714
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001715- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001716
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001717- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1718 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1719
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001720- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001721 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001722
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001723- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1724 DOS paths from other platforms.
1725
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001726Tools/Demos
1727-----------
1728
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001729- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1730 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1731 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1732 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1733 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1734 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1735 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1736 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1737 example:
1738
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001739 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1740 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001741
1742 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1743
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001744
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001745Build
1746-----
1747
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001748- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1749 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1750 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001751 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1752
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001753 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1754
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001755- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1756 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1757 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1758 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1759 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1760 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1761 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1762 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1763 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1764
1765- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1766 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1767 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1768 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1769
1770- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1771 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1772
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001773C API
1774-----
1775
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001776- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1777 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001778
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001779- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1780 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1781 tp_as_number pointer.
1782
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001783- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1784 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1785 (SF #681367)
1786
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001787- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1788 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1789 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1790 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001791
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001792Tests
1793-----
1794
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001795- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001796 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1797 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1798 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1799 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1800 pydoc.)
1801
1802- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1803
1804- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001805
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001806Windows
1807-------
1808
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001809- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1810 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1811 time).
1812
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001813- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1814 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1815
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001816- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1817 release without strong cryptography.
1818
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001819- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001820 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001821
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001822- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1823 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1824
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001825Mac
1826---
1827
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001828- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1829 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001830
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001831- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1832 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1833 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001834
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001835- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1836 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001837
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001838- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1839 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1840 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1841 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001842
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001843- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001844 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1845 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1846 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001847
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001848
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001849What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001850=================================
1851
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001852*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001853
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001854Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001855--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001856
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001857- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1858
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001859- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1860 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001861 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001862 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001863 a different meaning than before.
1864
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001865- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001866 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001867 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001868
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001869- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001870 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001871 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001872
1873- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1874 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1875 and deallocation.
1876
1877- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1878 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1879
1880- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1881 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1882 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1883 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1884 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1885
1886- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1887 now detected by the garbage collector.
1888
1889- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1890 [SF bug 519621]
1891
1892- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1893 identifier.
1894
1895- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1896 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1897 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1898 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1899 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1900 [SF bug 563060]
1901
1902- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1903 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1904 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1905 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1906 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1907
1908- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1909 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1910 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1911
1912- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1913
1914- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1915 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1916 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1917 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1918 state of the slots would be lost.)
1919
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001920Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001921-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001922
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001923- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001924 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1925 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1926 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1927 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001928 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1929 Jython 2.1.
1930
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001931- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001932 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001933 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1934 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1935 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1936 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1937 these, see PEP 302.
1938
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001939- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1940 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1941 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1942
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001943- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1944 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1945 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1946
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001947- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1948 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1949 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1950
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001951- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1952 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1953 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1954 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1955 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1956 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1957 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1958 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1959 releases or implementations.
1960
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001961- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001962 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1963 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001964
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001965- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1966 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1967
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001968- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1969 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1970 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1971
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001972- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1973 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1974
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001975- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1976 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001977 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1978 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001979
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001980- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1981 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1982 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1983 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1984 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1985
1986 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1987 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1988 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1989 pattern.
1990
1991 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1992 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1993 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1994 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1995
1996 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1997 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1998 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1999 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2000 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2001 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2002
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002003- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2004 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2005 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2006 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2007 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2008 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2009 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2010 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002011
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002012- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2013 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2014 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2015 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2016 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002017 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2018 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2019 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2020 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2021 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2022 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2023 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002024
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002025- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2026 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2027
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002028- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2029 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2030 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2031 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2032 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2033 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2034 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2035 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2036 to Zack Weinberg!
2037
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002038- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2039 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2040 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2041 type. This has been fixed now.
2042
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002043- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2044 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2045 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2046
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002047- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2048 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2049 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2050 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2051 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2052 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2053 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2054 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002055 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002056
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002057- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2058 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2059 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002060
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002061- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2062 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2063 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2064 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2065 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2066 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2067 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2068 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002069 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002070 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2071 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2072
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002073- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2074 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2075 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2076 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2077 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2078 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2079 this.)
2080
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002081- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2082 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002083 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002084 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002085 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2086 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002087 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2088 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002089
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002090- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2091 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2092 currently running.
2093
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002094- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2095 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2096 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2097 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2098
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002099- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2100 as directory names.
2101
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002102- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2103 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2104
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002105- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2106 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2107
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002108- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002109 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2110 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002111
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002112- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2113 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2114 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2115 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2116 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2117
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002118- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2119 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2120 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2121 removed.
2122
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002123- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2124 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2125 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2126
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002127- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2128 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2129 to __debug__.
2130
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002131- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2132 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2133 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2134
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002135- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2136 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2137 deprecated now.
2138
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002139- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2140 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2141 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002142
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002143- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2144 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2145 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2146 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2147 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002148
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002149- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2150 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2151
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002152- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2153 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2154 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002155 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002156 is backward compatible.
2157
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002158- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2159 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2160 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2161 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2162 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2163
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002164- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2165 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2166 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2167 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2168 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2169 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002170
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002171- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2172 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2173
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002174- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2175 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2176
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002177- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2178 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2179 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2180 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2181 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2182
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002183- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2184 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2185 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2186
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002187- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002188 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2189
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002190- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2191 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2192 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002193
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002194- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2195 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2196
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002197- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2198 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2199 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2200
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002201- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2202
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002203Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002204-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002205
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002206- Added three operators to the operator module:
2207 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2208 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2209 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2210
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002211- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2212
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002213- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2214 archives.
2215
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002216- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2217 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2218 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2219
2220 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2221
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002222- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2223 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2224 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002225 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002226
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002227- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2228 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2229 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2230 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002231 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2232 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2233 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2234 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002235
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002236- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2237 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002238
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002239- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2240
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002241- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2242 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2243
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002244- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2245 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2246 supported.
2247
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002248- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2249
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002250- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2251 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002252
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002253- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2254 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2255
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002256- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2257
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002258- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2259 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2260
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002261- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2262 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2263 functions but callable type objects.
2264
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002265- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002266 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002267 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002268
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002269- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2270 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002271
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002272- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2273 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002274
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002275- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2276 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2277 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2278 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2279
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002280- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2281 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002282
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002283- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2284 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2285 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2286 and __imul__.
2287
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002288- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002289 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2290 is called.
2291
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002292- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2293 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2294 interpreter was compiled.
2295
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002296- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2297 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2298 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002299 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002300 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2301 1, not 2.
2302
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002303- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2304 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2305 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2306 limit.
2307
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002308- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2309 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2310 bug #623464.
2311
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002312- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2313 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2314 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2315 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2316
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002317Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002318-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002319
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002320- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2321
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002322- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2323 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2324 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2325 with Python 2.3a2.
2326
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002327- os.path exposes getctime.
2328
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002329- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002330 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002331 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002332 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002333 unit tests of floating point results.
2334
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002335- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2336 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2337 has been increased.
2338
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002339- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2340 executed.
2341
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002342- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2343 postinstallation script.
2344
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002345- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2346 test the current module.
2347
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002348- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002349 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2350 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2351 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2352 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2353
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002354- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002355 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002356 Ward's Optik package.
2357
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002358- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2359 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2360 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2361 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2362
2363- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2364 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002365 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002366
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002367- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2368 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2369 shelf are binary pickles.
2370
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002371- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2372 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2373
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002374- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2375 modules are iterators now.
2376
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002377- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2378 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2379 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2380 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2381 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2382 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002383
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002384- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2385 with their entity value.
2386
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002387- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2388
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002389- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2390 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002391
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002392- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2393 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002394 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002395
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002396- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2397 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2398 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2399 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2400 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2401 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2402 main():
2403
2404 import locale
2405 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2406
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002407- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2408 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2409
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002410- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2411 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2412 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2413 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2414 to the new standard.
2415
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002416- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2417 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2418 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2419 an extension to the database.
2420
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002421- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2422 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2423 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2424 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002425 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002426
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002427- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002428 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002429
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002430- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2431 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2432 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2433 bounded integers.
2434
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002435- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2436 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2437 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2438 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2439 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2440 in existence.
2441
2442 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2443 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2444 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2445 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2446 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2447 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2448
2449 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2450 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2451 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2452 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2453
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002454- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2455 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2456 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2457
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002458- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2459
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002460- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2461 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2462 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2463 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2464
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002465- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2466 argument.
2467
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002468- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2469 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2470 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2471 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2472 [SF patch 560794].
2473
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002474- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2475 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2476 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002477 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2478 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2479 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002480
2481- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2482 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002483
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002484- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2485 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2486 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2487 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002488
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002489- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2490 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2491 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2492 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2493 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2494
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002495- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002496
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002497- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2498
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002499- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2500 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2501 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2502 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2503 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2504 identical to None.
2505
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002506- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2507 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2508 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2509 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2510 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2511 results now.
2512
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002513- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2514 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2515
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002516- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2517 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2518 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2519 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2520 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2521 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2522 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2523 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2524
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002525- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2526
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002527- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2528 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2529
2530- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2531 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2532 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2533 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2534 and other systems.
2535
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002536- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2537 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2538 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2539 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 +00002540 work well with these.
2541
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002542- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2543
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002544- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002545 connections.
2546
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002547- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2548 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2549 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2550
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002551- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2552 sets
2553
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002554- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2555 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2556 name.
2557
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002558- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2559 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2560 passed in.
2561
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002562- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002563 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002564 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2565 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002566
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002567- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2568
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002569- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2570
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002571- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2572 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2573 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2574
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002575- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2576 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2577 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2578 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002579 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002580
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002581- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002582 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002583 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002584
2585- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2586 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2587 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2588
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002589- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002590 the value of its expression argument.
2591
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002592- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2593 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2594 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2595
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002596- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2597 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2598 skipstone browser was included.
2599
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002600- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2601 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2602
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002603Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002604-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002605
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002606- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2607 names in addition to accepting file names.
2608
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002609- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2610 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2611 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2612 still used and useful.)
2613
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002614- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2615 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2616 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2617 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002618
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002619- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2620 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2621 the generated binary.
2622
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002623Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002624-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002625
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002626- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2627
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002628- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2629 except in the hands of experts.
2630
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002631- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002632 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2633 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2634 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002635
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002636- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2637 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2638 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2639 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2640 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2641 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2642 builds.
2643
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002644- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2645 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2646 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2647 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2648 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2649 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2650 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2651 new type.
2652
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002653- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002654
2655 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2656 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2657 positive infinities.
2658
2659 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2660 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2661 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2662 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2663 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2664 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2665 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2666
2667 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2668
2669 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2670
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002671- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2672 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2673 size of the executable.
2674
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002675- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2676 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2677 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2678 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002679
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002680- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2681
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002682- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2683 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2684 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002685
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002686- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2687 well as Unix.
2688
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002689- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2690 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2691 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2692 modules in the README file for details.
2693
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002694C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002695-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002696
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002697- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2698 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002699 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002700 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002701 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002702
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002703- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2704 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2705 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2706 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2707 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2708 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002709 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002710 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2711 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2712 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2713 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2714 aligned.)
2715
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002716- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2717 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2718 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2719
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002720- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2721 level.
2722
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002723- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2724 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2725 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2726 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2727 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2728
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002729- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2730 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2731 code.
2732
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002733- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2734 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2735 adjusting for negative indices.
2736
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002737- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2738 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2739 object.
2740
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002741- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2742 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2743 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2744
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002745- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2746 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002747
2748- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2749
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002750- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2751 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2752 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2753 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2754
2755- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2756
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002757- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002758
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002759- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002760 without going through the buffer API.
2761
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002762- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002763
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002764- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2765 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2766 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2767 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2768
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002769- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2770 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2771
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002772- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002773 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2774
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002775New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002777
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002778- OpenVMS is now supported.
2779
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002780- AtheOS is now supported.
2781
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002782- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2783
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002784- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2785
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002786Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787-----
2788
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002789- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2790 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2791 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002792
2793Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002795
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002796- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2797 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2798 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2799 bugs.
2800 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002801 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002802 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2803 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002804 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002805
2806- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002807 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002808
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002809- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2810 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2811
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002812- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2813 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002814 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002815 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2816
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002817- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2818 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2819 use files" uninstall option).
2820
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002821- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2822
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002823- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2824 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2825
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002826- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2827 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2828 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2829
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002830- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2831 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2832 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2833 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2834 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002835 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2836 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2837 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002838
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002839- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002840 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002841 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2842 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2843 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2844 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2845 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2846 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2847 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2848 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2849 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2850 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2851 work around.
2852
2853- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2854 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2855 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2856 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2857 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2858 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2859 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2860 specified with O_CREAT too).
2861
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002862Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002863----
2864
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002865- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002866
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002867- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2868 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2869 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2870
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002871- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2872 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2873 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2874
2875- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2876 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2877 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2878 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2879 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2880 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2881 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2882 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002883
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002884- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2885 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2886 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002887
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002888- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2889 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2890 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2891 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2892 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002893
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002894- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2895 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2896 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002897
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002898- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2899 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002900
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002901- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2902 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2903 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2904 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2905 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002906
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002907- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2908 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2909 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2910
2911- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2912 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2913 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002914
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002915- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2916 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2917 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2918 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002919 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002920
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002921- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2922 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002923
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002924- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2925 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002926
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002927- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002928 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002929 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2930 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002931
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002932
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002933What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002934===============================
2935
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2937
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002938Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002939--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002940
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002941- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2942 with a custom metaclass.
2943
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002944Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002946
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002947- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2948 are proxies.
2949
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002950Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002952
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002953- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2954 very short strings.
2955
2956- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2957 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2958 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2959 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2960 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2961
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002962Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002963-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002964
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002965- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2966 close or delete time).
2967
2968- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2969 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2970
2971- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2972
2973- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002974 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002975
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002976Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002977-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002978
2979Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002980-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002981
2982C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002983-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002984
2985New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002986-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002987
2988Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002989-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002990
2991Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002993
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002994- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2995
2996- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2997 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2998
2999- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3000 deleted at process exit time.
3001
3002- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3003 in backslash.
3004
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003005Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003006----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003007
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003008- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3009 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3010 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3011
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003012
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003013What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003014===========================
3015
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3017
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003018Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003019--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003020
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003021- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3022 been extensively updated. See
3023
3024 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3025
3026 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3027
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003028- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3029 deleted!
3030
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003031- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3032 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3033 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3034 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3035 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3036
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003037- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3038
3039 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3040 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3041
3042 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3043 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3044 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3045 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3046 supported anyway.
3047
3048 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3049 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3050
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003051- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3052 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3053 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3054 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3055 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003056
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003057- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3058 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3059 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3060
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003061Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003062-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003063
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003064- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3065 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3066 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3067 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3068 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3069 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003070 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3071 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3072 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3073 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003074
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003075- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3076 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3077 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3078
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003079Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003081
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003082- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3083
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003084Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003085-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003086
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003087- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3088 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3089 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3090 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3091 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3092 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3093
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003094- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3095
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003096- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3097
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003098- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3099
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003100- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3101 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3102 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3103
3104- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3105
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003106Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003107-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003108
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003109- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3110 off a search on Google.
3111
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003112Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003114
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003115- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3116 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3117 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3118 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3119 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3120 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3121 other platforms should do likewise.
3122
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003123- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3124 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3125 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3126
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003127C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003128-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003129
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003130- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3131 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3132 producing key-value pairs.
3133
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003134- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003135 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003136 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3137 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3138 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3139 previously went unchallenged.
3140
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003141New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003143
3144Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003146
3147Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003148-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003149
3150Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003151----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003152
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003153- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3154 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003155
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003156- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3157 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3158 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3159 home.
3160
3161
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003162What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003163===========================
3164
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3166
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003167Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003168--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003169
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003170- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3171 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003172
3173 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003174 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003175
3176 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3177 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003178 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003179 This needs to be documented.
3180
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003181- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3182 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3183
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003184- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3185 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3186 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3187
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003188- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3189 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3190
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003191- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3192 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3193 class forbids it).
3194
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003195- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3196 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3197 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3198
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003199- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3200
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003201Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003203
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003204- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3205 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003206 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003207
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003208- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3209 (like 1 + '').
3210
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003211Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003213
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003214- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3215 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3216 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3217 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003218 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003219 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3220
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003221- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3222 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3223 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3224 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3225
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003226- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3227 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003228 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3229 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3230 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003231
3232- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3233 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003234
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003235- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3236 bytes on its input.
3237
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003238Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003239-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003240
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003241- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003242 convenience function.
3243
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003244- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3245 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3246 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003247 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3248 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3249 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3250 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3251 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3252 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003253
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003254- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3255 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3256 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3257 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3258
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003259- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3260 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3261 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3262
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003263- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3264 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3265 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3266 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3267
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003268- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3269 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003270 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003271 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3272 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3273 new -l and -e options.
3274
3275- statcache is now deprecated.
3276
3277- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3278 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003280 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3281 time properly taken into account.
3282
3283- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3284 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3285 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3286 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3287
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003288Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003289-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003290
3291Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003293
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003294- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3295 is built with libdb3 if available.
3296
3297- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3298
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003299C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003300-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003301
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003302- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3303 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3304 PySequence_Size().
3305
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003306- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3307
3308- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3309 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3310 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3311
3312- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3313 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3314
3315- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3316 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3317
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003318New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003320
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003321- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3322 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3323
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003324- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3325 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3326
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003327- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3328
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003329Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003331
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003332- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3333 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3334
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003335Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003336-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003337
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003338Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003340
3341- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3342 removed completely in the next release.
3343
3344- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3345 OSX.
3346
3347- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3348 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3349
3350- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3351
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003352
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003353What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003354===========================
3355
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003356*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3357
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003358Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003360
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003361- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003362 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003363 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003364 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3365 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003366 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3367 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003368 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3369 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003370
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003371- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3372 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3373
3374- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3375 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3376
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003377Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003379
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003380- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3381 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3382 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3383 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3384 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3385 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3386 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3387 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3388
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003389- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3390 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3391 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3392 example).
3393
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003394- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003395 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003396 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003397 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003398
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003399- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3400 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3401 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003402 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003403
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003404- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3405 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3406 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3407 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3408 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3409 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3410
3411 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3412
3413 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3414
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003415Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003417
3418- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3419
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003420- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3421
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003422- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3423 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003424
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003425- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3426 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3427 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3428 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3429 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3430 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003431 attributes.
3432
3433- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3434 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3435 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003436
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003437- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3438 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3439 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003440
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003441- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3442 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3443 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003444 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3445 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3446
3447- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3448 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003449
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003450Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003452
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003453- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3454 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3455
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003456- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3457 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3458 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3459 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3460
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003461- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3462 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3463 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3464 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3465
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003466 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3467 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3468 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3469 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3470 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3471 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3472 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3473 without losing information).
3474
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003475- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003476 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3477 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3478 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3479 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3480 module).
3481
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003482 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003483 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3484 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3485 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3486 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003487
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003488- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003489 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3490 encoding.
3491
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003492- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3493 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3494
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003495- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003496 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3497
3498- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3499 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3500 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3501 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3502
3503- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3504
3505- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3506 ON, and OFF.
3507
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003508- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3509 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3510
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003511Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003512-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003513
3514- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3515 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3516 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003517
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003518- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3519 been added: -X and -E.
3520
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003521Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003523
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003524- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3525 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3526
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003527C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003529
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003530- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3531 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3532 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3533 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3534 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3535
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003536- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3537 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3538 as long) arguments.
3539
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003540- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3541 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3542 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3543 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3544 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3545 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3546
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003547- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3548 input.
3549
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003550New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003551-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003552
3553Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003554-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003555
3556Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003557-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003558
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003559- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3560 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3561 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3562
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003563- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3564 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3565 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003566 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003567
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3569 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3570 import signal
3571 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003572
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003574 while 1:
3575 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003576 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003577 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3578 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3579 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3580 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003581
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003582
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003583What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3584===========================
3585
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3587
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003588Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003589--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003590
3591- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3592 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3593 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3594
3595- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3596 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3597 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3598 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3599 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3600 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3601 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003602
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003603- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003604 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003605 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3606 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3607 associate a docstring with a property.
3608
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003609- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3610 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3611 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3612 other built-in object types.
3613
3614- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3615 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3616 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3617 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3618 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3619
3620- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3621 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3622
3623- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3624 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003625 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003626 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3627 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3628 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3629 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3630 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3631
3632- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3633 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3634 class.
3635
3636- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3637 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3638 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3639 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3640
3641- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3642 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3643 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3644 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3645
3646- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3647 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3648
3649- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3650 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3651 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3652 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3653 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003654 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003655 with the same value as s.
3656
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003657- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3658
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003659Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003660----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003661
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003662- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3663
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003664- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3665 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3666 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3667 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3668 objects.
3669
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003670- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3671 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003672 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3673 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3674
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003675- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3676 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3677 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3678
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003679Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003680-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003681
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003682- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3683 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3684 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3685 by the instances.
3686
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003687- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3688 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3689 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3690
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003691- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3692 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3693 before the entire comparison is complete.
3694
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003695- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3696 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3697 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3698
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003699- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3700 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3701 getwriter().
3702
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003703- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3704 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3705
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003706- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003707 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3708 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3709
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003710- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3711 iterable object.
3712
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003713- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3714 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003715
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003716- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3717 authentication.
3718
3719- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3720 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003721
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003722- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003723 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3724 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3725 a sample driver.)
3726
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003727Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003729
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003730- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3731 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3732 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3733 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3734 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3735 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3736 kernel has large file support.
3737
3738- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3739 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3740 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3741 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3742 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3743
3744- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3745 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3746 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3747
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003748C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003750
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003751- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3752 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3753
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003754New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003755-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003756
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003757- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3758 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3759
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003760Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003761-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003762
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003763- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3764 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3765 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3766 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3767 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3768
3769- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3770 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3771 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3772 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3773
3774- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3775 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3776
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003777Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003779
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003780- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003781 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3782 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003783
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003784
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003785What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3786===========================
3787
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3789
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003790Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003792
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003793- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3794 big to represent as a C double.
3795
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003796- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3797 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3798 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3799 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3800 restriction).
3801
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003802- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3803 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3804 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3805 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3806 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3807
3808 >>> dir([])
3809 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3810 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3811 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3812 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3813 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3814 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3815 'reverse', 'sort']
3816
3817 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3818
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003819- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003820 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3821 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3822 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3823 OverflowError exception.
3824
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003825- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003826 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003827 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3828 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3829 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3830 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3831 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003832 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003833 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3834 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3835
3836 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3837 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3838 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3839 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003840
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003841- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003842 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3843 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3844 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3845 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3846 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3847 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3848 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3849 once it is created.
3850
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003851- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3852 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3853 (key, value) pairs.
3854
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003855- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003856 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3857 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3858
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003859- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3860 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3861 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3862 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3863 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003864
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003865- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003866 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3867 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3868
3869 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3870
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003871- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003872 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3873
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003874Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003875-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003876
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003877- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003878 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3879 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003880
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003881- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3882 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3883 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3884 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3885 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3886 in this area anymore).
3887
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003888- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3889 threading.Timer.
3890
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003891- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3892 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3893
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003894- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003895 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3896
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003897- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003898 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3899 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3900 converted to Python longs.
3901
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003902- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003903 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3904
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003905- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3906 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3907 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3908
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003909Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003911
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003912- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3913 division operators as per PEP 238.
3914
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003915Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003917
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003918- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3919 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3920 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3921 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3922
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003923C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003925
3926- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003927
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003928- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3929 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003930 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003931
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003932 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3933 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003934 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003935 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003936
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003937- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003938 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3939 module:
3940
3941 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003942
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003943 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3944 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003945
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003946 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3947 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003948
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003949 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3950
3951 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3952
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003953- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003954 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3955 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3956 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003957
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003958New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003960
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003961- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3962 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3963 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3964 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3965 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003966
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003967Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003969
3970Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003972
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003973- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3974 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3975 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3976 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003977 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3978 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3979 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3980 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3981 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003982
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003983- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003984 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3985
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003986
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003987What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3988===========================
3989
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3991
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003992Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003993-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003994
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003995- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3996 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3997
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003998- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3999 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4000 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004001
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004002- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4003 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4004 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4005 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004006
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004007- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004010
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004011Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004012-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004013
4014- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004015 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004016 the module docstring for details.
4017
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004018Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004020
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004021- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004022 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4023 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4024 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004025
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004026- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4027 Nick Mathewson.
4028
4029Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004031
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004032- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4033 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4034 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4035 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4036 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4037 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4038 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4039 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4040
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004041- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4042 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4043 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4044 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4045
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004046- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4047 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4048 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4049 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4050 come a long way).
4051
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004052- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4053 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4054 write filters for these warnings).
4055
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004056- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4057 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4058 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4059 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4060 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4061
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004062- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4063 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4064 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4065 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4066 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4067 older distribution.
4068
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004069Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004071
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004072- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4073 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004074 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004075
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004076- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4077 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4078 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4079
4080- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4081
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004082- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4083
4084- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4085
4086- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4087
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004089
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004090- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4091
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004092New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004094
4095C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004097
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004098- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4099 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4100 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4101 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4102 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4103 against buffer overruns.
4104
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004105- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004106 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4107 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004108 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4109 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4110 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4111
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004112- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4113 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4114 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4115 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4116 deprecated.
4117
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004118Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004120
4121- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4122 relevant is found.
4123
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004124
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004125What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004126===========================
4127
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4129
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004130Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004131----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004132
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004133- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4134 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4135 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4136 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4137 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4138 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4139 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4140 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004141 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004142 repaired.
4143
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004144- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004145 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004146 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4147 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4148 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4149 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4150 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4151 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4152 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4153 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4154
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004155- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4156 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4157 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4158 leading BMO character).
4159
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004160- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4161 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4162 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4163
4164 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4165 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4166 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004167
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004168 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4169 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4170 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4171 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4172 for various simple to use conversions.
4173
4174 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4175 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4176
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4178 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4179 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4180 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4181 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4182 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4183 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4184 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4185 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4186 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4187 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4188 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4189 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4190 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4191 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004192
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004193- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4194 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4195 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004196 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004197 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004198
4199 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004200 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4201 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4202 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4203 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4204 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004205 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4206 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004207
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004208 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4209 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4210 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004211 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004212
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004213- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4214 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4215 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4216 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4217 floating arithmetic,
4218
4219 x = 9007199254740992.0
4220 print long(x)
4221
4222 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4223 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4224 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4225 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4226 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4227 functions are of good quality).
4228
4229 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4230 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4231 algorithms to break.
4232
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004233- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4234 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4235 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4236 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4237 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4238 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4239 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4240 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4241 order.
4242
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004243- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4244 operation along the most common code paths.
4245
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004246- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4247 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4248
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004249- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4250 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4251 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4252 {}.update(UserDict())
4253
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004254- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4255 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4256 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4257 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4258 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4259 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4260 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4261 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4262
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004263- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004264 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004266 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004267 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4268 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004269 join() method of strings
4270 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004271 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4272 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004274 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004275
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004276- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4277 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4278
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004279- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4280 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4281
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004282- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4283 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4284 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4285 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4286
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004287- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4288 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004289 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004290 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4291 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004292
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004293- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4294
4295
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004296Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004298
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004299- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004300 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004301 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4302 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4303
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004304- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4305 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4306
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004307- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4308 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4309 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4310 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4311
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004312- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4313 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4314 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4315
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004316- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4317
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004318- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4319
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004320- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4321 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4322 that are still imported into string.py).
4323
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004324- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4325
4326- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4327 Now it does.
4328
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004329- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4330
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004331- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4332 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4333 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4334 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4335 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004336 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4337 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004338
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004339- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4340 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4341 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4342 'help(object)'.
4343
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004344Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004346
4347- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004348 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004349 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4350 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4351
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004352- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004353 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4354 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004355
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004356C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004358
4359- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4360 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004361
4362----
4363
4364**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**