blob: 5759f3525ad49ec1837933e6c63be55ae277139e [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000015- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
16 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
17 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
18 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
19 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000020
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000021Extension modules
22-----------------
23
24Library
25-------
26
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000027- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
28 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
29 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
30 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
31 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
32 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
33 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
34 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
35 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
36 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
37 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
38 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
39 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
40
41
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000042Tools/Demos
43-----------
44
45Build
46-----
47
48C API
49-----
50
51Documentation
52-------------
53
54New platforms
55-------------
56
57Tests
58-----
59
60Windows
61-------
62
63Mac
64---
65
66
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000067What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
68=================================
69
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000070*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000071
72Core and builtins
73-----------------
74
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +000075- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
76 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
77 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
78 sensitive code.
79
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000080- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
81 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
82 @staticmethod
83 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000084 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000085
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000086- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
87 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
88 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
89 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
90 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
91 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
92 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
93 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
94 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
95 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
96 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
97
98 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
99 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
100 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
101 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
102 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
103 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
104 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
105
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000106- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
107 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
108
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000109- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000110 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000111
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000112- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000113 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000114 which was missing for no apparent reason.
115
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000116- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000117 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
118 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
119
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000120- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
121 types that support garbage collection.
122
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000123- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
124
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000125- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
126 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
127 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
128 Jython.
129
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000130- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
131
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000132- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
133 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
134
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000135- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
136 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
137 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000138
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000139- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
140 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
141 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
142
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000143Extension modules
144-----------------
145
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000146- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
147
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000148Library
149-------
150
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000151- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
152 TIS-620
153
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000154- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
155 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
156 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
157 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
158 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
159 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
160 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
161 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
162 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
163 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
164
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000165- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
166
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000167- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
168 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
169 same as when the argument is omitted).
170 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
171
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000172- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
173
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000174- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
175 schemes are offered.
176
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000177- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
178
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000179- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
180 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
181 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
182
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000183- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
184
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000185- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
186 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
187
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000188- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
189 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
190 when dummy_threading is being used.
191
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000192- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
193 from a tarfile.
194
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000195- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000196 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000197
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000198- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
199 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
200 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
201 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
202
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000203- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
204 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
205
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000206- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
207 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
208 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
209 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
210 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
211 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
212 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
213 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
214 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
215 by some other method in progress).
216
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000217- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
218 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
219 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000220
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000221- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
222
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000223- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
224 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
225 AM Kuchling.
226
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000227- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
228 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
229 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
230
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000231- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
232 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
233 instead of unsigned.
234
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000235- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000236 no longer part of the public API.
237
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000238- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
239 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
240 string methods of the same name).
241
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000242- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
243 SF patch 982681.
244
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000245- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000246 SF patch 945642.
247
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000248- doctest unittest integration improvements:
249
250 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
251
252 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
253 DocTestSuites.
254
255- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
256 that provide thread-local data.
257
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000258- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
259 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
260
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000261- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
262
263- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
264 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
265 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
266
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000267- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
268
269 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
270 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
271 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000272
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000273 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
274 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
275 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
276 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
277
278 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
279 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
280
281 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
282 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
283 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
284 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
285
286 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
287 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
288 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
289 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
290 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
291
292 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
293 wrapping help output.
294
295 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
296 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
297 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000298
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000299C API
300-----
301
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000302- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
303 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
304 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
305 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
306 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
307 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
308 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
309 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
310 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
311 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
312 its visible semantics have not changed.
313
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000314- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
315 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
316
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000317Documentation
318-------------
319
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000320- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000321
322 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000323 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000324
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000325 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000326
327 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
328
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000329- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000330
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000331Tests
332-----
333
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000334- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000335 platforms that use the Makefile.
336
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000337- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
338 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
339 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
340
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000341
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000342What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
343=================================
344
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000345*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000346
347Core and builtins
348-----------------
349
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000350- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
351 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
352 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
353 objects now (one object instead of three).
354
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000355- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
356 Windows DLLs.
357
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000358- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
359 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000360
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000361- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
362 a new .pyc magic.
363
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000364- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
365 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
366 be there.
367
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000368- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
369 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
370 the LC_NUMERIC category.
371
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000372- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
373 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
374 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
375
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000376- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
377
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000378- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
379 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
380 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000381
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000382- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
383 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
384
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000385- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
386
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000387- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000388 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000389
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000390- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
391
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000392- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
393
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000394- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
395 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
396
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000397- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
398 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
399 Fixes bug #858016 .
400
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000401- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
402 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
403 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
404
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000405- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
406 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
407 improves their performance (about 35%).
408
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000409- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
410 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
411 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
412
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000413- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
414 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
415 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
416 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
417
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000418- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
419 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
420 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
421 length is not known).
422
423- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
424 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000425 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
426 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000427 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
428
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000429- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
430 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
431
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000432- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
433 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
434 keyword arguments.
435
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000436- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
437 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
438 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
439
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000440- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
441 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
442 cases.
443
444- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
445 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
446 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
447 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
448 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
449 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
450 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
451 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
452 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
453 a release build.
454
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000455- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
456 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
457
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000458- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000459 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000460
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000461- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
462 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
463 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
464 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
465 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
466 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
467 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
468 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
469 destroyed.
470
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000471- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
472 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
473 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
474 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
475 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
476 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
477 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
478 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
479
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000480- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
481 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
482 character other than a space.
483
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000484- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
485 by the function object or by the method object, the function
486 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
487 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
488 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
489 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
490 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
491 attributes with the same name.
492
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000493- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
494 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
495 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
496 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
497 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
498 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
499 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
500 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
501 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
502 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
503 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
504 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
505 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
506 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000507
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000508- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
509 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
510 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
511 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
512 This has been repaired.
513
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000514- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
515
516- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
517
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000518- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
519 over a sequence.
520
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000521- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000522 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000523
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000524- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
525
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000526- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
527 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
528 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
529 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
530 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
531 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
532 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
533 records with equal keys is unchanged).
534
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000535- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
536 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
537 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
538
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000539- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
540 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
541 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
542 freelist.
543
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000544- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
545 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
546
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000547- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
548 number.
549
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000550- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
551 a TypeError exception.
552
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000553- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
554 820195.
555
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000556- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
557 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
558 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
559
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000560- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000561 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
562 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000563
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000564- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
565 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
566 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
567
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000568- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
569 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000570 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000571
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000572- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000573 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
574 the first call.
575
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000576
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000577Extension modules
578-----------------
579
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000580- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
581 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
582
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000583- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
584 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
585 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
586 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
587 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
588 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
589 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000590
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000591- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
592
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000593- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
594
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000595- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
596 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
597
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000598- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
599 fewer false positives.
600
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000601- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
602 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
603
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000604- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000605 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
606
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000607- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000608 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000609 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
610 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
611 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000612
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000613- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
614 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
615 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
616 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
617
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000618- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
619 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
620 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
621 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
622 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
623 #897625.
624
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000625- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
626 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
627
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000628- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
629 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
630 and pops on either side of the deque.
631
632- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
633 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
634
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000635- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
636 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
637 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
638 other functions that expect a function argument.
639
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000640- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
641
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000642- os.getsid was added.
643
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000644- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
645 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
646 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
647
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000648- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
649
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000650- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
651
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000652- readline.clear_history was added.
653
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000654- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
655
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000656- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
657
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000658- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
659
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000660- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
661
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000662- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
663
664- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
665
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000666- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
667
668- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
669
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000670- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
671 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
672 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
673
674- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
675 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
676 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
677 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
678 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
679 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
680 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
681
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000682- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
683 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
684 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
685 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000686
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000687- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000688 iterators from a single iterable.
689
690- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
691 of raising a TypeError exception.
692
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000693- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
694 as parameter.
695
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000696Library
697-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000698
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000699- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
700 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
701 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000702
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000703- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
704 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
705 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000706
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000707- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000708
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000709- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
710 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000711
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000712- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
713 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
714
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000715- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
716
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000717- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000718 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000719
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000720- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
721 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
722
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000723- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
724
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000725- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
726 on cygwin and mingw32.
727
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000728- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
729
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000730- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
731 module.
732
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000733- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
734 installation scheme for all platforms.
735
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000736- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000737 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000738
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000739- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
740 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
741 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
742
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000743- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
744 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
745 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
746
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000747- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
748
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000749- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
750
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000751- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
752 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
753
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000754- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
755 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
756 type pattern with the same value exists.
757
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000758- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
759 when run from the command prompt).
760
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000761- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
762 not taken into consideration when caching value.
763
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000764- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
765 default sort).
766
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000767- Added global runctx function to profile module
768
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000769- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
770
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000771- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
772
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000773- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
774
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000775- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000776 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
777 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
778 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
779 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
780 accordingly.
781
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000782- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
783 decoding standards.
784
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000785- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
786 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
787 called for all requests.
788
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000789- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
790 they are passed to the compiler.
791
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000792- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
793 indent, width and depth.
794
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000795- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
796 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
797
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000798- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
799 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
800
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000801- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
802
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000803- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
804
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000805- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
806
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000807- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
808 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
809
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000810- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000811 for better performance.
812
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000813- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000814
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000815- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
816 a string).
817
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000818- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
819
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000820- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
821
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000822- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
823
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000824- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
825
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000826- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
827 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
828 list of fieldnames.
829
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000830- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
831 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
832
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000833- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
834
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000835- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
836 empty lists.
837
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000838- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
839 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
840 and shelves.
841
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000842- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
843 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
844
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000845- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000846 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
847 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000848
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000849- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
850 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000851 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000852
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000853- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000854 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
855 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
856
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000857- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
858 and removed in Py2.4.
859
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000860- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
861
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000862- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
863
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000864Tools/Demos
865-----------
866
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000867- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
868 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
869
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000870- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
871
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000872- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
873 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
874 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
875 destination in situations where both files are given.
876
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000877- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
878 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
879 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
880 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
881
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000882- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
883
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000884- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
885 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
886 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
887 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
888 now.
889
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000890- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
891 in effect
892
893- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
894 C-c C-h
895
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000896- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
897 -d option was given.
898
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000899Build
900-----
901
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000902- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
903 build under OS X.
904
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000905- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
906 --enable-profiling.
907
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000908- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
909 is configured --with-tsc.
910
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000911- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
912 on AMD64.
913
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000914- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
915 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
916
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000917- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
918 removed.
919
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000920- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
921 supported (see PEP 11).
922
923- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
924
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000925- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
926
927- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
928 (see PEP 11).
929
930- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
931 sizeof(char) must be 1.
932
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000933C API
934-----
935
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000936- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
937 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
938 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
939
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000940- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
941 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
942 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
943 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
944
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000945- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
946 generator objects.
947
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000948- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
949 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000950 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
951 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000952
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000953- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
954 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
955
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000956- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
957 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
958 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
959 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
960 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
961
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000962- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
963 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
964 about 10% faster.
965
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000966- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
967 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
968
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000969- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
970 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
971 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
972 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
973
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000974Windows
975-------
976
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000977- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
978 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
979 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
980 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
981
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000982- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
983 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
984 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
985
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000986
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000987What's New in Python 2.3 final?
988===============================
989
990*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
991
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000992IDLE
993----
994
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000995- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
996 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
997 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
998 context-menu actions.
999
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001000- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1001 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1002 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1003 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1004 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1005 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1006 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1007 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1008 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1009
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001010
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001011What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1012=============================================
1013
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001014*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001015
1016Core and builtins
1017-----------------
1018
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001019- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001020 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001021 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1022
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001023Extension modules
1024-----------------
1025
1026- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1027 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1028 than once. This has been fixed.
1029
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001030- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1031 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1032 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1033 call.
1034
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001035- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1036
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001037Library
1038-------
1039
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001040- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1041 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1042
1043- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1044 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1045 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1046 restored.
1047
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001048IDLE
1049----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001050
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001051- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001052
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001053Build
1054-----
1055
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001056- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1057 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1058
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001059C API
1060-----
1061
1062Windows
1063-------
1064
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001065- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1066 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1067
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001068- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1069
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001070Mac
1071---
1072
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001073- Various fixes to pimp.
1074
1075- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1076
1077- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1078 more problems than it solves.
1079
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001080
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001081What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1082=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001083
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001084*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1085
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001086Core and builtins
1087-----------------
1088
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001089- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1090 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1091
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001092- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1093 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001094 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001095
1096- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1097 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1098 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001099 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001100
1101- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1102 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001103
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001104- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1105 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1106 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1107
1108- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001109 770247.
1110
1111- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001112
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001113Extension modules
1114-----------------
1115
1116- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1117 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1118
1119- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1120
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001121- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1122
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001123- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1124 contained within the _strptime module.
1125
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001126- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1127 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1128
1129- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001130 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1131
1132- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1133 the find_class attribute, if present.
1134
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001135- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001136
1137 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1138 (SF bug 763298).
1139
1140 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001141 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1142 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1143 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001144
1145 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1146
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001147Library
1148-------
1149
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001150- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1151
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001152- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1153 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1154 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1155 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1156 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1157 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1158 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1159 or Tester().
1160
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001161- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1162 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1163 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1164 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1165 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1166 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1167 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1168 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1169 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001170
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001171 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001172
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001173- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1174 weren't before was an oversight.
1175
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001176- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1177 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1178
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001179- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1180 when there are no lines.
1181
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001182- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1183 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1184
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001185- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1186 to child processes.
1187
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001188- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1189
1190- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1191
1192- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1193 xmlrpclib.
1194
1195- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1196 responses.
1197
1198- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1199 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1200
1201- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1202 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1203 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1204
1205- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1206 used as patterns.
1207
1208- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1209 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1210 than Tk 8.3.
1211
1212- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1213
1214- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001215
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001216Tools/Demos
1217-----------
1218
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001219- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1220
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001221- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1222
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001223- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001224
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001225Build
1226-----
1227
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001228- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1229
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001230- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1231
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001232- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1233 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001234
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001235- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1236 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1237 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001238
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001239C API
1240-----
1241
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001242- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1243 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1244
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001245Windows
1246-------
1247
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001248- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1249 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1250 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1251 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1252 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1253 Python exception ::
1254
1255 thread.error: can't start new thread
1256
1257 is raised now.
1258
1259- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1260 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1261 instead of from DLL teardown.
1262
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001263Mac
1264---
1265
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001266- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001267 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001268 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1269 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1270 the executable in the bundle.
1271
1272- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001273
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001274- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1275
1276- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1277 on Panther.
1278
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001279What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1280================================
1281
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001282*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001283
1284Core and builtins
1285-----------------
1286
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001287- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1288 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1289 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1290 with the -i option.
1291
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001292- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1293 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1294
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001295- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1296 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1297
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001298- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1299 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1300 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1301 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1302 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1303 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1304 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1305 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1306 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1307 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1308 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1309 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1310 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001311
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001312- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1313 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1314 embedded in a lambda expression.
1315
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001316- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1317 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1318 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1319 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1320 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1321
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001322- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1323 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1324 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1325
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001326- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1327 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1328
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001329- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1330 It's writable again.
1331
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001332- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1333 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1334 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001335 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001336
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001337- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1338 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1339 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1340
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001341Extension modules
1342-----------------
1343
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001344- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1345 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1346
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001347- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1348 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1349 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1350 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1351
1352- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1353 collection.
1354
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001355- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1356 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1357 unique within a single program run.
1358
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001359- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1360 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1361
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001362- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1363 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1364
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001365- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1366 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001367
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001368- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1369
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001370- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1371 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1372
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001373- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1374 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1375 for many BSD-derived systems.
1376
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001377
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001378Library
1379-------
1380
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001381- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1382 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1383 primary ones:
1384
1385 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1386 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1387 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1388
1389 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1390 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1391 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1392 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1393 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1394 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1395
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001396- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1397 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1398 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1399 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1400 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1401 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1402 argument.
1403
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001404- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1405 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1406 in the archive.
1407
1408- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1409 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1410
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001411- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1412 569574).
1413
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001414- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1415 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1416 no more.
1417
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001418- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1419 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1420 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1421 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1422 code coverage.
1423
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001424- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1425 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1426 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001427 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1428 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001429
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001430- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1431 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1432 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001433 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001434
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001435- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1436
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001437- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1438 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1439 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1440 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1441
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001442- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1443 handling.
1444
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001445- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1446 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1447
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001448- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1449 in socket.py.
1450
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001451- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1452
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001453- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1454 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1455 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1456 opener with proxy support.
1457
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001458- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1459
1460- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1461
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001462Tools/Demos
1463-----------
1464
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001465- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1466
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001467- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1468
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001469- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1470 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001471
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001472- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1473 files.
1474
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001475Build
1476-----
1477
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001478- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001479 different root directory.
1480
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001481C API
1482-----
1483
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001484- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1485 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1486 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1487 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1488 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1489 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1490 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1491 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1492 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1493 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1494
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001495- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1496 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1497 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1498 from Python.
1499
1500
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001501New platforms
1502-------------
1503
1504None this time.
1505
1506Tests
1507-----
1508
1509- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1510 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1511
1512Windows
1513-------
1514
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001515- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1516
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001517- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1518 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1519 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1520 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1521 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1522 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1523 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1524 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1525 that's what it's for.
1526
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001527Mac
1528---
1529
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001530- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1531 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1532 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1533 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001534- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1535 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1536- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001537
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001538SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1539------------------------------------
1540
1541430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1542598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1543622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1544661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1545683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1546697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1547713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1548724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1549727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1550729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1551730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1552731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1553732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1554733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1555735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1556740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1557744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1558745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1559747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1560749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1561751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1562753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1563755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1564757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1565760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1566
1567
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001568What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1569================================
1570
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001571*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001572
1573Core and builtins
1574-----------------
1575
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001576- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1577 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1578
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001579- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1580 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1581 and cannot be strings).
1582
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001583- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1584 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1585 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1586 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1587
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001588- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1589 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1590 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1591 Python itself.
1592
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001593- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1594 the referenced object, if it has one.
1595
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001596- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1597 the thread started at
1598 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1599
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001600- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1601 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1602 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1603 placed on a list index.
1604
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001605- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1606 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1607 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1608 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1609
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001610- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1611 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1612 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1613 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1614 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1615 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1616 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1617
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001618- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1619 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1620 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1621 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1622 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1623
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001624- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1625 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001626
1627- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1628 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1629 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1630 #693195.)
1631
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001632- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1633 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001634
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001635- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001636 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001637 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1638 interpreter executions, would fail.
1639
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001640- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001641 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001642 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001643
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001644Extension modules
1645-----------------
1646
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001647- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1648 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1649 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1650 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1651
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001652- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1653 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1654
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001655- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1656 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1657 and Greg Chapman.)
1658
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001659- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1660 recursively.
1661
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001662- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001663 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1664 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1665 leaks.
1666
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001667- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1668
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001669- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1670 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1671 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1672 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1673 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1674 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1675 #705836.
1676
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001677- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001678 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1679
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001680- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1681 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1682 See SF bug #692416.
1683
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001684- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1685 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1686
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001687- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1688 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1689 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001690
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001691- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001692 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1693 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1694
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001695- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1696 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1697 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1698 timeouts to work properly.
1699
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001700Library
1701-------
1702
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001703- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1704 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1705 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1706 future release.
1707
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001708- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1709 for querying platform dependent features.
1710
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001711- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001712
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001713- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1714 pickle protocol versions.
1715
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001716- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1717 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1718 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1719
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001720- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1721
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001722- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1723 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1724 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1725 modules.
1726
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001727- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1728 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1729 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1730
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001731- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1732 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1733
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001734- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1735 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1736 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1737
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001738- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001739 MS Office extensions.
1740
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001741- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1742 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1743
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001744- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1745 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1746
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001747- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1748 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1749 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1750 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1751 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1752 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1753
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001754- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1755 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1756 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001757
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001758- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1759 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1760 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1761
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001762- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1763
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001764- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1765 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1766 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1767
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001768Tools/Demos
1769-----------
1770
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001771- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1772 See the module docstring for details.
1773
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001774Build
1775-----
1776
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001777- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1778 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001779
1780C API
1781-----
1782
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001783- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1784
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001785- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1786 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1787 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1788
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001789- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1790 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001791
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001792 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1793 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1794 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001795
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001796- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001797 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1798
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001799- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1800 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1801 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001802
1803New platforms
1804-------------
1805
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001806None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001807
1808Tests
1809-----
1810
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001811- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1812 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001813
1814Windows
1815-------
1816
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001817- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1818 function.
1819
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001820- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1821 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001822
1823Mac
1824---
1825
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001826- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1827 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001828
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001829- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1830 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001831
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001832- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1833 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1834 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001835
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001836- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001837 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1838 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001839
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001840- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1841 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001842
1843
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001844What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1845=================================
1846
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001847*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001848
1849Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001850-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001851
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001852- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1853 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1854 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1855
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001856- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1857 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1858 (SF patch #664376.)
1859
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001860- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1861 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1862 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1863 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1864 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1865 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001866 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001867
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001868- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1869 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1870 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1871 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001872 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001873
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001874- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1875 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1876 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1877 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1878 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1879 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1880 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1881 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1882 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1883 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1884 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1885
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001886- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1887 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1888 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1889 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1890 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1891 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1892
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001893- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1894 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1895
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001896- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1897 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1898 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1899 case.)
1900
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001901- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1902 passed as unicode strings.
1903
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001904- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1905 See SF bug #683467.
1906
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001907- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1908 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1909
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001910- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1911
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001912- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1913
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001914- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1915 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1916 arguments.
1917
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001918- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1919 See SF bug #667147.
1920
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001921- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001922 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001923 See SF bug #676155.
1924
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001925- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001926 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001927 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1928 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1929 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1930 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1931 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1932 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001933
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001934Extension modules
1935-----------------
1936
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001937- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1938 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1939 tp_as_number pointer.
1940
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001941- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1942 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1943 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1944 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1945 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1946
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001947- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1948
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001949- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1950
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001951- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001952 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001953 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1954 patch #678531.)
1955
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001956- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1957 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1958
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001959- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1960 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1961
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001962- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1963
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001964- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1965 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1966 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1967
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001968- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1969
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001970- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1971 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1972
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001973- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001974
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001975- datetime changes:
1976
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001977 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1978
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001979 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1980 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1981 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1982 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1983 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1984 now.
1985
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001986 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001987 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1988 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001989
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001990 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001991 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001992 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1993 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1994 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1995 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001996
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001997 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1998 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1999 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002000 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2001
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002002 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2003 by a later example coded by Guido.
2004
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002005 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002006 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2007 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2008 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002009 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2010 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2011
2012 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2013 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2014 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2015 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2016 tzinfo subclass instance.
2017
2018 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2019 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2020 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2021 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2022 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2023 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2024 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2025 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002026
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002027 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2028 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2029 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2030 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2031 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002032 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2033
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002034 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002035
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002036 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2037 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2038 as a naive datetime object.
2039
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002040 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2041 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2042 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2043
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002044 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2045 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2046 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2047 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2048 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2049 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2050 comparison.
2051
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002052 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2053 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2054 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2055 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002056 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002057
2058 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002059
2060 and ::
2061
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002062 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2063
2064 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2065 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2066 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2067 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2068
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002069 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2070 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2071 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2072 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2073 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2074
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002075 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2076 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002077 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2078 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002079
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002080Library
2081-------
2082
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002083- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2084 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2085
2086- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2087 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2088 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2089 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2090 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2091 See PEP 307 for details.
2092
2093- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2094 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2095
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002096- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2097 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002098 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002099 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2100 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002101 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002102
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002103- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2104 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2105
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002106- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2107 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2108 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2109
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002110- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2111
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002112- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2113 exception.
2114
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002115- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2116 class.
2117
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002118- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2119 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2120 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2121
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002122- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2123 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2124
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002125- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002126 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2127 See SF bug #659228.
2128
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002129- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2130 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2131 See SF patch #651082.
2132
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002133- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002134
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002135- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2136 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2137
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002138- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002139 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002140
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002141- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2142 DOS paths from other platforms.
2143
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002144Tools/Demos
2145-----------
2146
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002147- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2148 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2149 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2150 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2151 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2152 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2153 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2154 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2155 example:
2156
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002157 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2158 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002159
2160 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2161
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002162
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002163Build
2164-----
2165
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002166- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2167 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2168 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002169 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2170
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002171 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2172
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002173- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2174 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2175 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2176 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2177 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2178 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2179 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2180 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2181 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2182
2183- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2184 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2185 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2186 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2187
2188- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2189 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2190
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002191C API
2192-----
2193
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002194- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2195 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002196
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002197- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2198 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2199 tp_as_number pointer.
2200
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002201- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2202 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2203 (SF #681367)
2204
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002205- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2206 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2207 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2208 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002209
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002210Tests
2211-----
2212
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002213- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002214 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2215 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2216 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2217 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2218 pydoc.)
2219
2220- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2221
2222- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002223
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002224Windows
2225-------
2226
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002227- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2228 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2229 time).
2230
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002231- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2232 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2233
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002234- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2235 release without strong cryptography.
2236
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002237- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002238 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002239
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002240- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2241 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2242
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002243Mac
2244---
2245
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002246- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2247 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002248
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002249- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2250 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2251 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002252
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002253- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2254 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002255
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002256- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2257 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2258 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2259 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002260
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002261- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002262 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2263 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2264 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002265
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002266
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002267What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002268=================================
2269
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002270*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002271
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002272Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002273--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002274
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002275- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2276
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002277- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2278 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002279 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002280 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002281 a different meaning than before.
2282
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002283- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002284 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002285 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002286
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002287- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002288 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002289 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002290
2291- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2292 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2293 and deallocation.
2294
2295- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2296 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2297
2298- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2299 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2300 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2301 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2302 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2303
2304- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2305 now detected by the garbage collector.
2306
2307- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2308 [SF bug 519621]
2309
2310- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2311 identifier.
2312
2313- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2314 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2315 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2316 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2317 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2318 [SF bug 563060]
2319
2320- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2321 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2322 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2323 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2324 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2325
2326- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2327 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2328 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2329
2330- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2331
2332- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2333 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2334 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2335 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2336 state of the slots would be lost.)
2337
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002338Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002339-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002340
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002341- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002342 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2343 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2344 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2345 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002346 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2347 Jython 2.1.
2348
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002349- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002350 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002351 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2352 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2353 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2354 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2355 these, see PEP 302.
2356
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002357- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2358 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2359 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2360
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002361- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2362 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2363 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2364
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002365- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2366 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2367 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2368
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002369- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2370 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2371 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2372 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2373 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2374 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2375 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2376 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2377 releases or implementations.
2378
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002379- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002380 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2381 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002382
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002383- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2384 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2385
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002386- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2387 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2388 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2389
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002390- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2391 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2392
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002393- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2394 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002395 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2396 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002397
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002398- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2399 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2400 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2401 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2402 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2403
2404 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2405 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2406 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2407 pattern.
2408
2409 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2410 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2411 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2412 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2413
2414 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2415 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2416 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2417 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2418 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2419 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2420
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002421- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2422 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2423 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2424 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2425 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2426 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2427 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2428 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002429
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002430- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2431 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2432 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2433 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2434 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002435 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2436 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2437 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2438 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2439 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2440 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2441 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002442
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002443- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2444 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2445
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002446- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2447 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2448 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2449 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2450 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2451 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2452 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2453 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2454 to Zack Weinberg!
2455
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002456- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2457 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2458 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2459 type. This has been fixed now.
2460
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002461- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2462 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2463 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2464
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002465- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2466 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2467 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2468 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2469 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2470 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2471 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2472 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002473 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002474
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002475- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2476 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2477 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002478
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002479- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2480 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2481 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2482 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2483 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2484 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2485 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2486 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002487 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002488 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2489 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2490
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002491- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2492 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2493 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2494 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2495 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2496 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2497 this.)
2498
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002499- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2500 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002501 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002502 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002503 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2504 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002505 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2506 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002507
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002508- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2509 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2510 currently running.
2511
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002512- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2513 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2514 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2515 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2516
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002517- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2518 as directory names.
2519
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002520- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2521 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2522
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002523- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2524 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2525
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002526- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002527 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2528 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002529
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002530- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2531 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2532 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2533 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2534 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2535
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002536- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2537 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2538 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2539 removed.
2540
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002541- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2542 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2543 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2544
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002545- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2546 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2547 to __debug__.
2548
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002549- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2550 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2551 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2552
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002553- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2554 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2555 deprecated now.
2556
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002557- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2558 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2559 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002560
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002561- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2562 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2563 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2564 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2565 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002566
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002567- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2568 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2569
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002570- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2571 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2572 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002573 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002574 is backward compatible.
2575
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002576- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2577 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2578 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2579 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2580 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2581
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002582- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2583 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2584 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2585 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2586 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2587 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002588
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002589- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2590 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2591
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002592- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2593 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2594
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002595- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2596 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2597 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2598 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2599 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2600
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002601- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2602 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2603 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2604
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002605- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002606 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2607
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002608- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2609 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2610 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002611
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002612- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2613 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2614
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002615- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2616 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2617 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2618
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002619- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002621Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002622-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002623
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002624- Added three operators to the operator module:
2625 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2626 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2627 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2628
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002629- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2630
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002631- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2632 archives.
2633
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002634- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2635 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2636 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2637
2638 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2639
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002640- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2641 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2642 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002643 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002644
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002645- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2646 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2647 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2648 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002649 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2650 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2651 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2652 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002653
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002654- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2655 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002656
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002657- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2658
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002659- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2660 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2661
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002662- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2663 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2664 supported.
2665
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002666- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2667
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002668- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2669 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002670
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002671- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2672 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2673
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002674- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2675
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002676- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2677 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2678
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002679- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2680 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2681 functions but callable type objects.
2682
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002683- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002684 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002685 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002686
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002687- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2688 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002689
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002690- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2691 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002692
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002693- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2694 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2695 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2696 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2697
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002698- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2699 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002700
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002701- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2702 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2703 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2704 and __imul__.
2705
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002706- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002707 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2708 is called.
2709
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002710- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2711 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2712 interpreter was compiled.
2713
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002714- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2715 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2716 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002717 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002718 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2719 1, not 2.
2720
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002721- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2722 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2723 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2724 limit.
2725
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002726- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2727 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2728 bug #623464.
2729
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002730- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2731 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2732 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2733 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2734
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002735Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002736-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002737
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002738- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2739
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002740- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2741 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2742 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2743 with Python 2.3a2.
2744
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002745- os.path exposes getctime.
2746
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002747- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002748 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002749 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002750 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002751 unit tests of floating point results.
2752
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002753- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2754 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2755 has been increased.
2756
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002757- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2758 executed.
2759
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002760- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2761 postinstallation script.
2762
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002763- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2764 test the current module.
2765
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002766- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002767 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2768 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2769 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2770 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2771
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002772- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002773 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002774 Ward's Optik package.
2775
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002776- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2777 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2778 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2779 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2780
2781- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2782 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002783 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002784
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002785- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2786 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2787 shelf are binary pickles.
2788
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002789- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2790 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2791
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002792- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2793 modules are iterators now.
2794
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002795- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2796 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2797 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2798 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2799 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2800 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002801
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002802- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2803 with their entity value.
2804
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002805- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2806
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002807- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2808 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002809
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002810- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2811 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002812 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002813
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002814- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2815 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2816 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2817 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2818 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2819 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2820 main():
2821
2822 import locale
2823 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2824
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002825- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2826 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2827
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002828- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2829 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2830 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2831 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2832 to the new standard.
2833
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002834- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2835 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2836 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2837 an extension to the database.
2838
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002839- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2840 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2841 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2842 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002843 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002844
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002845- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002846 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002847
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002848- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2849 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2850 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2851 bounded integers.
2852
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002853- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2854 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2855 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2856 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2857 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2858 in existence.
2859
2860 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2861 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2862 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2863 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2864 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2865 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2866
2867 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2868 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2869 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2870 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2871
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002872- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2873 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2874 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2875
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002876- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2877
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002878- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2879 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2880 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2881 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2882
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002883- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2884 argument.
2885
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002886- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2887 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2888 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2889 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2890 [SF patch 560794].
2891
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002892- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2893 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2894 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002895 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2896 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2897 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002898
2899- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2900 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002901
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002902- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2903 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2904 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2905 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002906
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002907- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2908 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2909 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2910 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2911 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2912
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002913- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002914
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002915- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2916
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002917- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2918 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2919 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2920 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2921 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2922 identical to None.
2923
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002924- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2925 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2926 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2927 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2928 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2929 results now.
2930
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002931- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2932 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2933
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002934- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2935 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2936 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2937 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2938 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2939 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2940 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2941 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2942
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002943- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2944
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002945- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2946 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2947
2948- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2949 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2950 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2951 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2952 and other systems.
2953
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002954- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2955 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2956 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2957 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 +00002958 work well with these.
2959
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002960- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2961
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002962- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002963 connections.
2964
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002965- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2966 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2967 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2968
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002969- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2970 sets
2971
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002972- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2973 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2974 name.
2975
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002976- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2977 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2978 passed in.
2979
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002980- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002981 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002982 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2983 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002984
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002985- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2986
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002987- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2988
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002989- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2990 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2991 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2992
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002993- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2994 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2995 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2996 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002997 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002998
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002999- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003000 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003001 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003002
3003- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3004 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3005 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3006
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003007- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003008 the value of its expression argument.
3009
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003010- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3011 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3012 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3013
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003014- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3015 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3016 skipstone browser was included.
3017
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003018- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3019 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3020
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003021Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003022-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003023
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003024- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3025 names in addition to accepting file names.
3026
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003027- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3028 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3029 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3030 still used and useful.)
3031
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003032- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3033 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3034 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3035 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003036
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003037- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3038 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3039 the generated binary.
3040
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003041Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003042-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003043
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003044- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3045
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003046- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3047 except in the hands of experts.
3048
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003049- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003050 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3051 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3052 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003053
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003054- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3055 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3056 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3057 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3058 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3059 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3060 builds.
3061
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003062- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3063 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3064 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3065 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3066 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3067 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3068 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3069 new type.
3070
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003071- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003072
3073 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3074 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3075 positive infinities.
3076
3077 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3078 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3079 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3080 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3081 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3082 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3083 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3084
3085 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3086
3087 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3088
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003089- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3090 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3091 size of the executable.
3092
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003093- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3094 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3095 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3096 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003097
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003098- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3099
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003100- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3101 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3102 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003103
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003104- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3105 well as Unix.
3106
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003107- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3108 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3109 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3110 modules in the README file for details.
3111
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003112C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003114
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003115- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3116 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003117 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003118 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003119 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003120
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003121- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3122 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3123 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3124 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3125 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3126 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003127 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003128 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3129 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3130 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3131 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3132 aligned.)
3133
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003134- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3135 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3136 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3137
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003138- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3139 level.
3140
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003141- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3142 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3143 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3144 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3145 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3146
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003147- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3148 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3149 code.
3150
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003151- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3152 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3153 adjusting for negative indices.
3154
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003155- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3156 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3157 object.
3158
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003159- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3160 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3161 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3162
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003163- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3164 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003165
3166- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3167
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003168- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3169 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3170 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3171 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3172
3173- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3174
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003175- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003176
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003177- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003178 without going through the buffer API.
3179
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003181
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003182- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3183 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3184 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3185 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3186
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003187- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3188 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3189
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003190- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003191 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3192
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003193New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003195
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003196- OpenVMS is now supported.
3197
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003198- AtheOS is now supported.
3199
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003200- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3201
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003202- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3203
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003204Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205-----
3206
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003207- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3208 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3209 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003210
3211Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003213
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003214- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3215 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3216 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3217 bugs.
3218 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003219 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003220 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3221 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003222 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003223
3224- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003225 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003226
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003227- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3228 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3229
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003230- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3231 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003232 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003233 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3234
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003235- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3236 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3237 use files" uninstall option).
3238
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003239- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3240
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003241- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3242 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3243
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003244- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3245 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3246 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3247
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003248- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3249 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3250 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3251 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3252 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003253 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3254 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3255 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003256
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003257- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003258 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003259 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3260 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3261 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3262 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3263 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3264 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3265 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3266 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3267 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3268 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3269 work around.
3270
3271- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3272 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3273 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3274 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3275 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3276 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3277 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3278 specified with O_CREAT too).
3279
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003280Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003281----
3282
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003283- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003284
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003285- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3286 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3287 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3288
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003289- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3290 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3291 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3292
3293- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3294 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3295 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3296 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3297 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3298 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3299 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3300 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003301
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003302- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3303 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3304 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003305
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003306- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3307 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3308 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3309 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3310 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003311
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003312- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3313 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3314 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003315
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003316- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3317 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003318
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003319- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3320 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3321 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3322 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3323 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003324
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003325- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3326 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3327 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3328
3329- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3330 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3331 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003332
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003333- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3334 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3335 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3336 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003337 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003338
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003339- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3340 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003341
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003342- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3343 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003344
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003345- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003346 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003347 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3348 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003349
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003350
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003351What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003352===============================
3353
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3355
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003356Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003358
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003359- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3360 with a custom metaclass.
3361
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003362Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003364
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003365- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3366 are proxies.
3367
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003368Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003369-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003370
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003371- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3372 very short strings.
3373
3374- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3375 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3376 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3377 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3378 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3379
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003380Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003381-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003382
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003383- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3384 close or delete time).
3385
3386- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3387 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3388
3389- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3390
3391- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003392 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003393
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003394Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003396
3397Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003398-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003399
3400C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003401-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003402
3403New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003404-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003405
3406Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003407-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003408
3409Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003411
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003412- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3413
3414- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3415 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3416
3417- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3418 deleted at process exit time.
3419
3420- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3421 in backslash.
3422
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003423Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003424----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003425
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003426- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3427 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3428 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3429
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003430
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003431What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003432===========================
3433
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003434*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3435
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003436Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003437--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003438
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003439- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3440 been extensively updated. See
3441
3442 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3443
3444 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3445
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003446- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3447 deleted!
3448
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003449- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3450 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3451 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3452 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3453 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3454
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003455- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3456
3457 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3458 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3459
3460 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3461 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3462 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3463 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3464 supported anyway.
3465
3466 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3467 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3468
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003469- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3470 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3471 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3472 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3473 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003474
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003475- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3476 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3477 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3478
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003479Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003480-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003481
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003482- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3483 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3484 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3485 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3486 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3487 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003488 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3489 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3490 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3491 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003492
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003493- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3494 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3495 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3496
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003497Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003498-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003499
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003500- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3501
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003502Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003504
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003505- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3506 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3507 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3508 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3509 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3510 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3511
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003512- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3513
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003514- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3515
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003516- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3517
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003518- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3519 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3520 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3521
3522- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3523
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003524Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003525-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003526
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003527- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3528 off a search on Google.
3529
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003530Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003531-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003532
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003533- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3534 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3535 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3536 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3537 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3538 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3539 other platforms should do likewise.
3540
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003541- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3542 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3543 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3544
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003545C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003547
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003548- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3549 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3550 producing key-value pairs.
3551
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003552- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003553 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003554 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3555 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3556 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3557 previously went unchallenged.
3558
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003559New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003561
3562Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003563-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003564
3565Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003567
3568Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003570
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003571- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3572 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003573
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003574- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3575 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3576 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3577 home.
3578
3579
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003580What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003581===========================
3582
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003583*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3584
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003585Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003587
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003588- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3589 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003590
3591 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003592 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003593
3594 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3595 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003596 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003597 This needs to be documented.
3598
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003599- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3600 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3601
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003602- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3603 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3604 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3605
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003606- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3607 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3608
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003609- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3610 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3611 class forbids it).
3612
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003613- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3614 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3615 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3616
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003617- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3618
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003619Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003620-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003621
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003622- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3623 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003624 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003625
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003626- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3627 (like 1 + '').
3628
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003629Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003631
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003632- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3633 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3634 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3635 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003636 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003637 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3638
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003639- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3640 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3641 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3642 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3643
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003644- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3645 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003646 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3647 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3648 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003649
3650- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3651 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003652
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003653- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3654 bytes on its input.
3655
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003656Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003658
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003659- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003660 convenience function.
3661
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003662- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3663 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3664 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003665 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3666 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3667 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3668 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3669 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3670 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003671
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003672- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3673 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3674 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3675 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3676
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003677- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3678 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3679 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3680
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003681- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3682 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3683 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3684 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3685
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003686- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3687 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003689 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3690 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3691 new -l and -e options.
3692
3693- statcache is now deprecated.
3694
3695- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3696 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003697 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003698 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3699 time properly taken into account.
3700
3701- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3702 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3703 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3704 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3705
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003706Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003707-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003708
3709Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003711
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003712- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3713 is built with libdb3 if available.
3714
3715- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3716
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003717C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003719
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003720- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3721 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3722 PySequence_Size().
3723
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003724- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3725
3726- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3727 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3728 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3729
3730- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3731 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3732
3733- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3734 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3735
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003736New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003738
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003739- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3740 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3741
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003742- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3743 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3744
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003745- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3746
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003747Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003749
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003750- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3751 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3752
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003753Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003755
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003756Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003758
3759- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3760 removed completely in the next release.
3761
3762- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3763 OSX.
3764
3765- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3766 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3767
3768- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3769
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003770
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003771What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003772===========================
3773
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3775
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003776Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003778
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003779- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003780 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003781 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003782 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3783 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003784 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3785 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003786 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3787 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003788
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003789- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3790 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3791
3792- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3793 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3794
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003795Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003797
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003798- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3799 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3800 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3801 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3802 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3803 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3804 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3805 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3806
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003807- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3808 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3809 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3810 example).
3811
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003812- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003813 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003814 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003815 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003816
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003817- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3818 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3819 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003820 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003821
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003822- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3823 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3824 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3825 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3826 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3827 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3828
3829 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3830
3831 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3832
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003833Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003835
3836- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3837
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003838- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3839
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003840- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3841 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003842
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003843- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3844 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3845 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3846 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3847 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3848 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003849 attributes.
3850
3851- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3852 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3853 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003854
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003855- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3856 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3857 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003858
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003859- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3860 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3861 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003862 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3863 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3864
3865- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3866 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003867
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003868Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003870
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003871- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3872 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3873
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003874- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3875 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3876 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3877 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3878
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003879- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3880 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3881 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3882 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3883
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003884 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3885 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3886 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3887 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3888 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3889 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3890 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3891 without losing information).
3892
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003893- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003894 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3895 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3896 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3897 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3898 module).
3899
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003900 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003901 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3902 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3903 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3904 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003905
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003906- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003907 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3908 encoding.
3909
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003910- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3911 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3912
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003914 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3915
3916- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3917 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3918 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3919 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3920
3921- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3922
3923- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3924 ON, and OFF.
3925
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003926- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3927 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3928
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003929Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003930-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003931
3932- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3933 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3934 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003935
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003936- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3937 been added: -X and -E.
3938
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003939Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003941
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003942- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3943 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3944
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003945C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003947
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003948- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3949 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3950 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3951 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3952 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3953
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003954- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3955 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3956 as long) arguments.
3957
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003958- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3959 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3960 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3961 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3962 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3963 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3964
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003965- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3966 input.
3967
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003968New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003970
3971Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003972-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003973
3974Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003976
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003977- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3978 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3979 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3980
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003981- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3982 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3983 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003984 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003985
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3987 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3988 import signal
3989 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003990
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003991 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003992 while 1:
3993 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003995 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3996 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3997 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3998 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003999
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004000
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004001What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4002===========================
4003
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4005
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004006Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004007--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004008
4009- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4010 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4011 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4012
4013- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4014 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4015 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4016 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4017 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4018 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4019 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004020
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004021- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004022 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004023 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4024 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4025 associate a docstring with a property.
4026
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004027- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4028 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4029 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4030 other built-in object types.
4031
4032- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4033 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4034 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4035 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4036 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4037
4038- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4039 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4040
4041- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4042 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004043 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004044 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4045 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4046 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4047 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4048 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4049
4050- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4051 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4052 class.
4053
4054- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4055 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4056 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4057 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4058
4059- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4060 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4061 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4062 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4063
4064- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4065 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4066
4067- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4068 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4069 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4070 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4071 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004072 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004073 with the same value as s.
4074
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004075- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4076
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004077Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004079
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004080- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4081
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004082- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4083 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4084 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4085 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4086 objects.
4087
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004088- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4089 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004090 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4091 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4092
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004093- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4094 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4095 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4096
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004097Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004099
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004100- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4101 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4102 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4103 by the instances.
4104
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004105- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4106 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4107 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4108
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004109- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4110 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4111 before the entire comparison is complete.
4112
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004113- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4114 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4115 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4116
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004117- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4118 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4119 getwriter().
4120
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004121- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4122 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4123
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004124- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004125 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4126 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4127
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004128- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4129 iterable object.
4130
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004131- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4132 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004133
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004134- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4135 authentication.
4136
4137- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4138 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004139
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004140- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004141 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4142 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4143 a sample driver.)
4144
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004145Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004147
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004148- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4149 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4150 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4151 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4152 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4153 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4154 kernel has large file support.
4155
4156- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4157 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4158 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4159 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4160 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4161
4162- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4163 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4164 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4165
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004166C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004168
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004169- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4170 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4171
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004172New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004174
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004175- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4176 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4177
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004178Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004180
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004181- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4182 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4183 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4184 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4185 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4186
4187- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4188 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4189 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4190 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4191
4192- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4193 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4194
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004195Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004197
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004198- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004199 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4200 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004201
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004202
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004203What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4204===========================
4205
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4207
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004208Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004209----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004210
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004211- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4212 big to represent as a C double.
4213
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004214- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4215 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4216 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4217 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4218 restriction).
4219
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004220- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4221 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4222 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4223 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4224 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4225
4226 >>> dir([])
4227 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4228 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4229 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4230 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4231 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4232 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4233 'reverse', 'sort']
4234
4235 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4236
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004237- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004238 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4239 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4240 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4241 OverflowError exception.
4242
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004243- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004244 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004245 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4246 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4247 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4248 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4249 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004250 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004251 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4252 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4253
4254 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4255 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4256 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4257 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004258
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004259- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004260 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4261 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4262 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4263 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4264 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4265 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4266 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4267 once it is created.
4268
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004269- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4270 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4271 (key, value) pairs.
4272
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004273- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004274 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4275 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4276
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004277- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4278 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4279 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4280 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4281 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004282
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004283- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004284 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4285 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4286
4287 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4288
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004289- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004290 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4291
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004292Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004294
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004295- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004296 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4297 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004298
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004299- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4300 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4301 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4302 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4303 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4304 in this area anymore).
4305
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004306- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4307 threading.Timer.
4308
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004309- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4310 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4311
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004312- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004313 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4314
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004315- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004316 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4317 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4318 converted to Python longs.
4319
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004320- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004321 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4322
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004323- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4324 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4325 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4326
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004327Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004329
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004330- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4331 division operators as per PEP 238.
4332
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004333Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004335
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004336- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4337 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4338 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4339 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4340
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004341C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004343
4344- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004345
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004346- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4347 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004348 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004349
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4351 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004352 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004354
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004355- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004356 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4357 module:
4358
4359 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004360
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004361 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4362 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004363
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004364 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4365 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004366
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004367 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4368
4369 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4370
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004371- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004372 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4373 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4374 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004375
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004376New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004378
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004379- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4380 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4381 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4382 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4383 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004384
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004385Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004387
4388Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004389-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004390
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004391- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4392 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4393 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4394 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004395 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4396 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4397 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4398 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4399 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004400
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004401- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004402 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4403
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004404
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004405What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4406===========================
4407
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4409
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004410Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004412
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004413- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4414 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4415
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004416- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4417 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4418 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004419
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004420- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4421 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4422 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4423 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004424
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004425- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4426
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004427- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004428
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004429Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004431
4432- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004433 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004434 the module docstring for details.
4435
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004436Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004437-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004438
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004439- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004440 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4441 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4442 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004443
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004444- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4445 Nick Mathewson.
4446
4447Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004449
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004450- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4451 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4452 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4453 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4454 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4455 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4456 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4457 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4458
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004459- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4460 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4461 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4462 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4463
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004464- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4465 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4466 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4467 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4468 come a long way).
4469
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004470- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4471 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4472 write filters for these warnings).
4473
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004474- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4475 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4476 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4477 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4478 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4479
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004480- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4481 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4482 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4483 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4484 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4485 older distribution.
4486
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004487Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004488-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004489
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004490- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4491 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004492 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004493
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004494- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4495 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4496 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4497
4498- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4499
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004500- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4501
4502- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4503
4504- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4505
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004506- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004507
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004508- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4509
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004510New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004512
4513C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004515
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004516- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4517 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4518 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4519 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4520 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4521 against buffer overruns.
4522
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004523- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004524 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4525 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004526 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4527 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4528 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4529
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004530- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4531 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4532 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4533 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4534 deprecated.
4535
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004536Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004537-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004538
4539- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4540 relevant is found.
4541
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004542
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004543What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004544===========================
4545
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004546*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4547
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004548Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004549----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004550
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004551- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4552 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4553 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4554 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4555 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4556 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4557 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4558 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004559 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004560 repaired.
4561
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004562- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004563 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004564 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4565 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4566 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4567 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4568 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4569 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4570 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4571 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4572
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004573- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4574 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4575 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4576 leading BMO character).
4577
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004578- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4579 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4580 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4581
4582 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4583 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4584 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004585
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004586 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4587 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4588 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4589 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4590 for various simple to use conversions.
4591
4592 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4593 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4594
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004595 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4596 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4597 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4598 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4599 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4600 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4601 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4602 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4603 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4604 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4605 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4606 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4607 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4608 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4609 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004610
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004611- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4612 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4613 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004614 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004615 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004616
4617 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004618 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4619 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4620 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4621 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4622 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004623 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4624 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004625
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004626 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4627 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4628 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004629 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004630
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004631- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4632 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4633 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4634 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4635 floating arithmetic,
4636
4637 x = 9007199254740992.0
4638 print long(x)
4639
4640 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4641 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4642 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4643 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4644 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4645 functions are of good quality).
4646
4647 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4648 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4649 algorithms to break.
4650
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004651- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4652 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4653 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4654 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4655 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4656 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4657 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4658 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4659 order.
4660
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004661- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4662 operation along the most common code paths.
4663
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004664- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4665 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4666
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004667- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4668 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4669 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4670 {}.update(UserDict())
4671
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004672- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4673 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4674 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4675 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4676 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4677 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4678 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4679 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4680
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004681- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004682 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004684 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004685 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4686 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004687 join() method of strings
4688 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004689 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4690 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004692 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004693
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004694- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4695 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4696
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004697- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4698 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4699
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004700- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4701 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4702 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4703 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4704
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004705- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4706 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004707 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004708 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4709 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004710
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004711- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4712
4713
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004714Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004716
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004717- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004718 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004719 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4720 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4721
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004722- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4723 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4724
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004725- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4726 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4727 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4728 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4729
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004730- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4731 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4732 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4733
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004734- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4735
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004736- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4737
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004738- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4739 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4740 that are still imported into string.py).
4741
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004742- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4743
4744- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4745 Now it does.
4746
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004747- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4748
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004749- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4750 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4751 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4752 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4753 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004754 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4755 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004756
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004757- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4758 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4759 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4760 'help(object)'.
4761
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004762Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004763-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004764
4765- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004766 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004767 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4768 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4769
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004770- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004771 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4772 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004773
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004774C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004775-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004776
4777- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4778 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779
4780----
4781
4782**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**