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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000015- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
16 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
17 improves their performance (about 35%).
18
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000019- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
20 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
21 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
22
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000023- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
24 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
25 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
26 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
27
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000028- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
29 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
30 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
31 length is not known).
32
33- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
34 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000035 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
36 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000037 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
38
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000039- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
40 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
41 keyword arguments.
42
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000043- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
44 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
45 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
46
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000047- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
48 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
49 cases.
50
51- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
52 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
53 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
54 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
55 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
56 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
57 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
58 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
59 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
60 a release build.
61
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000062- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
63 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
64
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000065- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000066 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000067
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000068- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
69 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
70 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
71 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
72 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
73 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
74 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
75 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
76 destroyed.
77
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000078- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
79 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
80 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
81 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
82 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
83 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
84 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
85 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
86
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000087- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
88 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
89 character other than a space.
90
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000091- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
92 by the function object or by the method object, the function
93 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
94 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
95 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
96 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
97 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
98 attributes with the same name.
99
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000100- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
101 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
102 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
103 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
104 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
105 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
106 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
107 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
108 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
109 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
110 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
111 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
112 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
113 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000114
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000115- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
116 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
117 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
118 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
119 This has been repaired.
120
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000121- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
122
123- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
124
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000125- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
126 over a sequence.
127
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000128- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
129 from any iterable.
130
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000131- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
132
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000133- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
134 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
135 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
136 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
137 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
138 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
139 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
140 records with equal keys is unchanged).
141
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000142- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
143 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
144 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
145
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000146- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
147 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
148 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
149 freelist.
150
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000151- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
152 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
153
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000154- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
155 number.
156
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000157- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
158 a TypeError exception.
159
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000160- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
161 820195.
162
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000163- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
164 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
165 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
166
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000167- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
168 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
169 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000170
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000171- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
172 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
173 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
174
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000175Extension modules
176-----------------
177
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000178- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
179 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
180 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
181 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
182
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000183- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
184 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
185 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
186 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
187 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
188 #897625.
189
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000190- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
191 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
192
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000193- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
194 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
195 and pops on either side of the deque.
196
197- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
198 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
199
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000200- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
201 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
202 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
203 other functions that expect a function argument.
204
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000205- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
206
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000207- os.getsid was added.
208
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000209- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
210 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
211 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
212
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000213- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
214
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000215- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
216
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000217- readline.clear_history was added.
218
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000219- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
220
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000221- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
222
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000223- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
224
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000225- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
226
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000227- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
228
229- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
230
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000231- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
232
233- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
234
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000235- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
236 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
237 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
238
239- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
240 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
241 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
242 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
243 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
244 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
245 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
246
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000247- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
248 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
249 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
250 the Unix uniq filter.
251
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000252- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
253 iterators from a single iterable.
254
255- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
256 of raising a TypeError exception.
257
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000258- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
259 as parameter.
260
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000261Library
262-------
263
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000264- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
265
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000266- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
267 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
268 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
269 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
270 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
271 accordingly.
272
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000273- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
274 decoding standards.
275
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000276- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
277 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
278 called for all requests.
279
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000280- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
281 they are passed to the compiler.
282
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000283- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
284 indent, width and depth.
285
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000286- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
287 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
288
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000289- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
290 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
291
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000292- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
293
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000294- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
295
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000296- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
297
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000298- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
299 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
300
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000301- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
302 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000303
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000304- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
305 a string).
306
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000307- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
308
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000309- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
310
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000311- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
312
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000313- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
314
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000315- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
316 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
317 list of fieldnames.
318
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000319- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
320 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
321
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000322- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
323
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000324- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
325 empty lists.
326
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000327- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
328 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
329 and shelves.
330
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000331- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
332 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
333
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000334- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000335 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
336 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000337
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000338- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
339 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000340 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000341
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000342- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000343 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
344 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
345
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000346- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
347 and removed in Py2.4.
348
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000349- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
350
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000351- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
352
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000353Tools/Demos
354-----------
355
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000356- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
357 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
358
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000359- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
360
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000361- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
362 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
363 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
364 destination in situations where both files are given.
365
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000366- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
367 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
368 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
369 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
370
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000371- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
372
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000373- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
374 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
375 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
376 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
377 now.
378
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000379- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
380 in effect
381
382- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
383 C-c C-h
384
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000385- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
386 -d option was given.
387
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000388Build
389-----
390
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000391- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
392 removed.
393
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000394- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
395 supported (see PEP 11).
396
397- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
398
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000399- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
400
401- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
402 (see PEP 11).
403
404- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
405 sizeof(char) must be 1.
406
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000407C API
408-----
409
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000410- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
411 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
412 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
413 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
414 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
415
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000416- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
417 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
418 about 10% faster.
419
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000420- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
421 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
422
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000423- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
424 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
425 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
426 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
427
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000428New platforms
429-------------
430
431Tests
432-----
433
434Windows
435-------
436
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000437- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
438 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
439 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
440 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
441
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000442- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
443 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
444 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
445
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000446Mac
447----
448
449
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000450What's New in Python 2.3 final?
451===============================
452
453*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
454
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000455IDLE
456----
457
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000458- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
459 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
460 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
461 context-menu actions.
462
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000463- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
464 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
465 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
466 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
467 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
468 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
469 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
470 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
471 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
472
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000473
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000474What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
475=============================================
476
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000477*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000478
479Core and builtins
480-----------------
481
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000482- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000483 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000484 comment at the end are still unsupported.
485
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000486Extension modules
487-----------------
488
489- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
490 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
491 than once. This has been fixed.
492
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000493- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
494 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
495 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
496 call.
497
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000498- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
499
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000500Library
501-------
502
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000503- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
504 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
505
506- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
507 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
508 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
509 restored.
510
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000511IDLE
512----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000513
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000514- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000515
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000516Build
517-----
518
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000519- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
520 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
521
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000522C API
523-----
524
525Windows
526-------
527
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000528- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
529 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
530
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000531- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
532
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000533Mac
534---
535
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000536- Various fixes to pimp.
537
538- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
539
540- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
541 more problems than it solves.
542
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000543
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000544What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
545=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000546
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000547*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
548
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000549Core and builtins
550-----------------
551
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000552- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
553 by sys.setcheckinterval().
554
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000555- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
556 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000557 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000558
559- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
560 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
561 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000562 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000563
564- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
565 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000566
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000567- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
568 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
569 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
570
571- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000572 770247.
573
574- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000575
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000576Extension modules
577-----------------
578
579- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
580 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
581
582- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
583
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000584- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
585
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000586- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
587 contained within the _strptime module.
588
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000589- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
590 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
591
592- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000593 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
594
595- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
596 the find_class attribute, if present.
597
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000598- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000599
600 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
601 (SF bug 763298).
602
603 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000604 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
605 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
606 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000607
608 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
609
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000610Library
611-------
612
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000613- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
614
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000615- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
616 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
617 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
618 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
619 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
620 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
621 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
622 or Tester().
623
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000624- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
625 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
626 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
627 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
628 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
629 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
630 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
631 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
632 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000633
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000634 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000635
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000636- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
637 weren't before was an oversight.
638
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000639- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
640 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
641
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000642- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
643 when there are no lines.
644
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000645- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
646 which could occur with Tk 8.4
647
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000648- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
649 to child processes.
650
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000651- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
652
653- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
654
655- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
656 xmlrpclib.
657
658- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
659 responses.
660
661- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
662 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
663
664- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
665 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
666 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
667
668- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
669 used as patterns.
670
671- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
672 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
673 than Tk 8.3.
674
675- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
676
677- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000678
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000679Tools/Demos
680-----------
681
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000682- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
683
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000684- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
685
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000686- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000687
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000688Build
689-----
690
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000691- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
692
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000693- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
694
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000695- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
696 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000697
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000698- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
699 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
700 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000701
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000702C API
703-----
704
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000705- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
706 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
707
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000708Windows
709-------
710
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000711- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
712 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
713 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
714 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
715 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
716 Python exception ::
717
718 thread.error: can't start new thread
719
720 is raised now.
721
722- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
723 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
724 instead of from DLL teardown.
725
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000726Mac
727---
728
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000729- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000730 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000731 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
732 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
733 the executable in the bundle.
734
735- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000736
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000737- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
738
739- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
740 on Panther.
741
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000742What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
743================================
744
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000745*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000746
747Core and builtins
748-----------------
749
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000750- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
751 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
752 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
753 with the -i option.
754
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000755- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
756 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
757
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000758- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
759 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
760
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000761- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
762 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
763 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
764 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
765 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
766 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
767 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
768 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
769 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
770 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
771 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
772 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
773 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000774
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000775- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
776 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
777 embedded in a lambda expression.
778
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000779- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
780 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
781 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
782 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
783 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
784
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000785- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
786 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
787 matches the restriction on classic classes.
788
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000789- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
790 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
791
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000792- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
793 It's writable again.
794
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000795- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
796 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
797 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000798 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000799
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000800- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
801 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
802 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
803
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000804Extension modules
805-----------------
806
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000807- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
808 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
809
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000810- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
811 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
812 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
813 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
814
815- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
816 collection.
817
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000818- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
819 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
820 unique within a single program run.
821
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000822- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
823 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
824
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000825- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
826 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
827
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000828- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
829 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000830
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000831- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
832
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000833- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
834 Fixes SF bug #730685.
835
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000836- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
837 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
838 for many BSD-derived systems.
839
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000840
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000841Library
842-------
843
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000844- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
845 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
846 primary ones:
847
848 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
849 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
850 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
851
852 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
853 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
854 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
855 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
856 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
857 framework features (which doctest lacks).
858
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000859- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
860 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
861 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
862 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
863 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
864 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
865 argument.
866
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000867- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
868 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
869 in the archive.
870
871- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
872 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
873
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000874- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
875 569574).
876
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000877- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
878 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
879 no more.
880
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000881- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
882 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
883 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
884 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
885 code coverage.
886
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000887- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
888 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
889 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000890 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
891 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000892
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000893- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
894 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
895 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000896 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000897
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000898- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
899
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000900- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
901 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
902 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
903 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
904
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000905- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
906 handling.
907
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000908- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
909 __doc__ of data descriptors.
910
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000911- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
912 in socket.py.
913
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000914- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
915
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000916- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
917 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
918 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
919 opener with proxy support.
920
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000921- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
922
923- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
924
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000925Tools/Demos
926-----------
927
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000928- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
929
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000930- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
931
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000932- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
933 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000934
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000935- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
936 files.
937
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000938Build
939-----
940
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000941- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000942 different root directory.
943
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000944C API
945-----
946
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000947- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
948 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
949 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
950 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
951 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
952 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
953 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
954 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
955 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
956 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
957
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000958- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
959 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
960 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
961 from Python.
962
963
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000964New platforms
965-------------
966
967None this time.
968
969Tests
970-----
971
972- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
973 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
974
975Windows
976-------
977
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000978- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
979
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000980- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
981 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
982 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
983 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
984 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
985 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
986 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
987 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
988 that's what it's for.
989
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000990Mac
991---
992
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000993- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
994 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
995 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
996 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000997- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
998 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
999- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001000
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001001SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1002------------------------------------
1003
1004430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1005598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1006622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1007661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1008683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1009697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1010713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1011724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1012727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1013729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1014730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1015731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1016732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1017733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1018735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1019740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1020744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1021745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1022747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1023749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1024751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1025753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1026755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1027757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1028760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1029
1030
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001031What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1032================================
1033
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001034*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001035
1036Core and builtins
1037-----------------
1038
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001039- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1040 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1041
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001042- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1043 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1044 and cannot be strings).
1045
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001046- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1047 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1048 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1049 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1050
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001051- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1052 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1053 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1054 Python itself.
1055
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001056- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1057 the referenced object, if it has one.
1058
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001059- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1060 the thread started at
1061 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1062
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001063- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1064 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1065 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1066 placed on a list index.
1067
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001068- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1069 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1070 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1071 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1072
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001073- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1074 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1075 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1076 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1077 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1078 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1079 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1080
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001081- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1082 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1083 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1084 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1085 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1086
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001087- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1088 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001089
1090- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1091 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1092 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1093 #693195.)
1094
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001095- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1096 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001097
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001098- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001099 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001100 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1101 interpreter executions, would fail.
1102
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001103- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001104 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001105 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001106
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001107Extension modules
1108-----------------
1109
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001110- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1111 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1112 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1113 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1114
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001115- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1116 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1117
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001118- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1119 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1120 and Greg Chapman.)
1121
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001122- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1123 recursively.
1124
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001125- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001126 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1127 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1128 leaks.
1129
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001130- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1131
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001132- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1133 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1134 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1135 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1136 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1137 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1138 #705836.
1139
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001140- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001141 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1142
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001143- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1144 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1145 See SF bug #692416.
1146
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001147- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1148 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1149
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001150- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1151 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1152 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001153
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001154- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001155 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1156 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1157
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001158- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1159 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1160 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1161 timeouts to work properly.
1162
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001163Library
1164-------
1165
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001166- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1167 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1168 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1169 future release.
1170
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001171- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1172 for querying platform dependent features.
1173
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001174- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001175
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001176- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1177 pickle protocol versions.
1178
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001179- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1180 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1181 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1182
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001183- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1184
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001185- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1186 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1187 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1188 modules.
1189
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001190- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1191 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1192 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1193
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001194- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1195 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1196
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001197- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1198 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1199 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1200
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001201- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001202 MS Office extensions.
1203
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001204- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1205 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1206
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001207- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1208 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1209
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001210- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1211 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1212 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1213 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1214 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1215 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1216
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001217- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1218 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1219 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001220
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001221- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1222 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1223 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1224
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001225- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1226
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001227- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1228 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1229 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1230
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001231Tools/Demos
1232-----------
1233
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001234- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1235 See the module docstring for details.
1236
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001237Build
1238-----
1239
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001240- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1241 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001242
1243C API
1244-----
1245
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001246- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1247
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001248- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1249 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1250 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1251
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001252- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1253 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001254
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001255 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1256 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1257 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001258
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001259- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001260 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1261
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001262- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1263 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1264 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001265
1266New platforms
1267-------------
1268
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001269None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001270
1271Tests
1272-----
1273
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001274- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1275 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001276
1277Windows
1278-------
1279
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001280- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1281 function.
1282
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001283- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1284 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001285
1286Mac
1287---
1288
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001289- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1290 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001291
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001292- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1293 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001294
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001295- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1296 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1297 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001298
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001299- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001300 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1301 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001302
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001303- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1304 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001305
1306
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001307What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1308=================================
1309
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001310*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001311
1312Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001313-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001314
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001315- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1316 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1317 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1318
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001319- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1320 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1321 (SF patch #664376.)
1322
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001323- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1324 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1325 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1326 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1327 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1328 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001329 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001330
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001331- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1332 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1333 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1334 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001335 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001336
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001337- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1338 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1339 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1340 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1341 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1342 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1343 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1344 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1345 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1346 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1347 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1348
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001349- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1350 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1351 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1352 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1353 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1354 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1355
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001356- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1357 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1358
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001359- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1360 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1361 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1362 case.)
1363
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001364- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1365 passed as unicode strings.
1366
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001367- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1368 See SF bug #683467.
1369
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001370- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1371 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1372
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001373- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1374
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001375- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1376
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001377- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1378 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1379 arguments.
1380
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001381- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1382 See SF bug #667147.
1383
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001384- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001385 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001386 See SF bug #676155.
1387
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001388- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001389 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001390 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1391 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1392 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1393 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1394 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1395 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001396
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001397Extension modules
1398-----------------
1399
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001400- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1401 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1402 tp_as_number pointer.
1403
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001404- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1405 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1406 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1407 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1408 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1409
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001410- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1411
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001412- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1413
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001414- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001415 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001416 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1417 patch #678531.)
1418
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001419- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1420 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1421
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001422- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1423 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1424
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001425- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1426
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001427- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1428 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1429 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1430
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001431- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1432
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001433- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1434 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1435
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001436- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001437
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001438- datetime changes:
1439
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001440 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1441
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001442 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1443 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1444 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1445 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1446 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1447 now.
1448
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001449 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001450 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1451 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001452
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001453 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001454 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001455 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1456 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1457 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1458 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001459
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001460 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1461 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1462 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001463 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1464
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001465 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1466 by a later example coded by Guido.
1467
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001468 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001469 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1470 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1471 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001472 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1473 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1474
1475 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1476 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1477 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1478 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1479 tzinfo subclass instance.
1480
1481 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1482 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1483 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1484 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1485 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1486 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1487 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1488 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001489
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001490 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1491 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1492 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1493 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1494 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001495 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1496
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001497 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001498
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001499 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1500 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1501 as a naive datetime object.
1502
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001503 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1504 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1505 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1506
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001507 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1508 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1509 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1510 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1511 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1512 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1513 comparison.
1514
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001515 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1516 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1517 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1518 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001519 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001520
1521 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001522
1523 and ::
1524
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001525 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1526
1527 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1528 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1529 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1530 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1531
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001532 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1533 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1534 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1535 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1536 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1537
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001538 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1539 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001540 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1541 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001542
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001543Library
1544-------
1545
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001546- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1547 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1548
1549- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1550 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1551 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1552 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1553 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1554 See PEP 307 for details.
1555
1556- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1557 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1558
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001559- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1560 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001561 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001562 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1563 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001564 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001565
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001566- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1567 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1568
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001569- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1570 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1571 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1572
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001573- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1574
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001575- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1576 exception.
1577
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001578- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1579 class.
1580
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001581- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1582 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1583 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1584
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001585- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1586 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1587
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001588- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001589 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1590 See SF bug #659228.
1591
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001592- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1593 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1594 See SF patch #651082.
1595
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001596- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001597
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001598- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1599 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1600
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001601- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001602 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001603
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001604- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1605 DOS paths from other platforms.
1606
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001607Tools/Demos
1608-----------
1609
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001610- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1611 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1612 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1613 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1614 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1615 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1616 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1617 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1618 example:
1619
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001620 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1621 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001622
1623 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1624
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001625
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001626Build
1627-----
1628
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001629- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1630 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1631 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001632 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1633
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001634 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1635
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001636- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1637 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1638 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1639 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1640 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1641 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1642 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1643 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1644 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1645
1646- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1647 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1648 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1649 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1650
1651- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1652 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1653
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001654C API
1655-----
1656
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001657- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1658 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001659
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001660- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1661 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1662 tp_as_number pointer.
1663
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001664- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1665 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1666 (SF #681367)
1667
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001668- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1669 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1670 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1671 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001672
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001673Tests
1674-----
1675
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001676- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001677 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1678 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1679 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1680 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1681 pydoc.)
1682
1683- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1684
1685- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001686
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001687Windows
1688-------
1689
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001690- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1691 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1692 time).
1693
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001694- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1695 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1696
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001697- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1698 release without strong cryptography.
1699
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001700- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001701 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001702
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001703- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1704 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1705
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001706Mac
1707---
1708
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001709- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1710 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001711
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001712- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1713 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1714 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001715
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001716- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1717 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001718
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001719- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1720 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1721 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1722 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001723
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001724- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001725 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1726 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1727 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001728
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001729
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001730What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001731=================================
1732
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001733*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001734
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001735Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001736--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001737
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001738- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1739
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001740- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1741 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001742 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001743 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001744 a different meaning than before.
1745
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001746- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001747 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001748 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001749
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001750- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001751 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001752 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001753
1754- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1755 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1756 and deallocation.
1757
1758- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1759 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1760
1761- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1762 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1763 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1764 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1765 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1766
1767- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1768 now detected by the garbage collector.
1769
1770- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1771 [SF bug 519621]
1772
1773- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1774 identifier.
1775
1776- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1777 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1778 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1779 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1780 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1781 [SF bug 563060]
1782
1783- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1784 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1785 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1786 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1787 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1788
1789- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1790 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1791 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1792
1793- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1794
1795- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1796 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1797 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1798 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1799 state of the slots would be lost.)
1800
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001801Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001802-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001803
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001804- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001805 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1806 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1807 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1808 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001809 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1810 Jython 2.1.
1811
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001812- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001813 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001814 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1815 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1816 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1817 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1818 these, see PEP 302.
1819
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001820- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1821 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1822 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1823
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001824- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1825 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1826 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1827
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001828- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1829 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1830 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1831
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001832- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1833 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1834 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1835 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1836 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1837 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1838 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1839 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1840 releases or implementations.
1841
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001842- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001843 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1844 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001845
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001846- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1847 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1848
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001849- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1850 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1851 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1852
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001853- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1854 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1855
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001856- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1857 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001858 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1859 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001860
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001861- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1862 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1863 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1864 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1865 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1866
1867 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1868 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1869 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1870 pattern.
1871
1872 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1873 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1874 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1875 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1876
1877 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1878 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1879 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1880 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1881 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1882 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1883
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001884- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1885 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1886 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1887 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1888 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1889 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1890 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1891 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001892
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001893- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1894 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1895 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1896 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1897 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001898 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1899 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1900 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1901 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1902 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1903 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1904 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001905
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001906- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1907 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1908
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001909- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1910 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1911 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1912 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1913 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1914 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1915 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1916 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1917 to Zack Weinberg!
1918
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001919- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1920 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1921 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1922 type. This has been fixed now.
1923
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001924- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1925 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1926 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1927
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001928- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1929 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1930 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1931 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1932 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1933 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1934 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1935 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001936 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001937
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001938- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1939 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1940 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001941
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001942- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1943 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1944 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1945 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1946 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1947 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1948 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1949 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001950 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001951 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1952 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1953
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001954- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1955 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1956 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1957 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1958 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1959 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1960 this.)
1961
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001962- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1963 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001964 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001965 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001966 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1967 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001968 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1969 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001970
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001971- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1972 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1973 currently running.
1974
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001975- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1976 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1977 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1978 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1979
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001980- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1981 as directory names.
1982
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001983- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1984 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1985
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001986- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1987 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1988
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001989- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001990 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1991 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001992
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001993- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1994 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1995 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1996 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1997 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1998
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001999- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2000 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2001 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2002 removed.
2003
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002004- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2005 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2006 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2007
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002008- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2009 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2010 to __debug__.
2011
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002012- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2013 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2014 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2015
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002016- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2017 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2018 deprecated now.
2019
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002020- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2021 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2022 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002023
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002024- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2025 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2026 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2027 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2028 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002029
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002030- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2031 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2032
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002033- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2034 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2035 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002036 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002037 is backward compatible.
2038
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002039- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2040 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2041 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2042 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2043 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2044
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002045- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2046 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2047 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2048 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2049 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2050 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002051
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002052- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2053 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2054
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002055- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2056 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2057
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002058- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2059 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2060 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2061 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2062 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2063
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002064- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2065 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2066 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2067
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002068- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002069 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2070
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002071- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2072 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2073 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002074
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002075- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2076 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2077
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002078- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2079 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2080 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2081
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002082- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2083
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002084Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002085-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002086
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002087- Added three operators to the operator module:
2088 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2089 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2090 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2091
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002092- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2093
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002094- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2095 archives.
2096
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002097- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2098 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2099 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2100
2101 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2102
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002103- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2104 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2105 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002106 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002107
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002108- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2109 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2110 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2111 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002112 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2113 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2114 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2115 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002116
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002117- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2118 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002119
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002120- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2121
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002122- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2123 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2124
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002125- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2126 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2127 supported.
2128
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002129- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2130
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002131- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2132 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002133
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002134- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2135 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2136
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002137- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2138
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002139- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2140 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2141
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002142- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2143 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2144 functions but callable type objects.
2145
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002146- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002147 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002148 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002149
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002150- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2151 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002152
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002153- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2154 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002155
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002156- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2157 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2158 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2159 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2160
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002161- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2162 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002163
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002164- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2165 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2166 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2167 and __imul__.
2168
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002169- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002170 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2171 is called.
2172
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002173- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2174 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2175 interpreter was compiled.
2176
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002177- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2178 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2179 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002180 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002181 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2182 1, not 2.
2183
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002184- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2185 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2186 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2187 limit.
2188
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002189- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2190 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2191 bug #623464.
2192
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002193- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2194 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2195 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2196 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2197
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002198Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002199-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002200
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002201- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2202
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002203- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2204 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2205 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2206 with Python 2.3a2.
2207
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002208- os.path exposes getctime.
2209
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002210- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002211 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002212 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002213 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002214 unit tests of floating point results.
2215
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002216- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2217 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2218 has been increased.
2219
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002220- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2221 executed.
2222
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002223- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2224 postinstallation script.
2225
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002226- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2227 test the current module.
2228
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002229- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002230 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2231 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2232 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2233 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2234
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002235- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002236 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002237 Ward's Optik package.
2238
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002239- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2240 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2241 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2242 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2243
2244- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2245 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002246 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002247
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002248- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2249 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2250 shelf are binary pickles.
2251
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002252- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2253 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2254
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002255- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2256 modules are iterators now.
2257
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002258- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2259 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2260 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2261 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2262 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2263 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002264
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002265- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2266 with their entity value.
2267
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002268- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2269
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002270- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2271 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002272
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002273- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2274 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002275 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002276
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002277- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2278 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2279 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2280 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2281 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2282 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2283 main():
2284
2285 import locale
2286 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2287
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002288- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2289 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2290
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002291- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2292 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2293 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2294 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2295 to the new standard.
2296
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002297- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2298 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2299 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2300 an extension to the database.
2301
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002302- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2303 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2304 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2305 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002306 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002307
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002308- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002309 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002310
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002311- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2312 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2313 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2314 bounded integers.
2315
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002316- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2317 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2318 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2319 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2320 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2321 in existence.
2322
2323 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2324 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2325 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2326 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2327 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2328 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2329
2330 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2331 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2332 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2333 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2334
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002335- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2336 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2337 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2338
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002339- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2340
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002341- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2342 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2343 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2344 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2345
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002346- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2347 argument.
2348
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002349- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2350 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2351 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2352 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2353 [SF patch 560794].
2354
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002355- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2356 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2357 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002358 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2359 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2360 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002361
2362- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2363 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002364
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002365- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2366 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2367 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2368 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002369
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002370- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2371 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2372 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2373 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2374 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2375
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002376- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002377
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002378- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2379
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002380- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2381 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2382 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2383 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2384 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2385 identical to None.
2386
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002387- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2388 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2389 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2390 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2391 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2392 results now.
2393
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002394- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2395 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2396
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002397- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2398 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2399 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2400 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2401 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2402 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2403 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2404 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2405
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002406- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2407
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002408- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2409 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2410
2411- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2412 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2413 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2414 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2415 and other systems.
2416
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002417- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2418 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2419 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2420 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 +00002421 work well with these.
2422
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002423- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2424
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002425- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002426 connections.
2427
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002428- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2429 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2430 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2431
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002432- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2433 sets
2434
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002435- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2436 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2437 name.
2438
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002439- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2440 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2441 passed in.
2442
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002443- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002444 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002445 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2446 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002447
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002448- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2449
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002450- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2451
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002452- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2453 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2454 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2455
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002456- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2457 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2458 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2459 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002460 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002461
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002462- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002463 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002464 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002465
2466- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2467 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2468 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2469
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002470- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002471 the value of its expression argument.
2472
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002473- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2474 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2475 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2476
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002477- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2478 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2479 skipstone browser was included.
2480
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002481- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2482 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2483
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002484Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002485-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002486
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002487- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2488 names in addition to accepting file names.
2489
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002490- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2491 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2492 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2493 still used and useful.)
2494
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002495- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2496 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2497 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2498 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002499
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002500- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2501 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2502 the generated binary.
2503
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002504Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002505-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002506
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002507- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2508
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002509- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2510 except in the hands of experts.
2511
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002512- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002513 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2514 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2515 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002516
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002517- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2518 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2519 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2520 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2521 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2522 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2523 builds.
2524
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002525- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2526 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2527 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2528 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2529 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2530 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2531 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2532 new type.
2533
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002534- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002535
2536 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2537 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2538 positive infinities.
2539
2540 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2541 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2542 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2543 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2544 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2545 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2546 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2547
2548 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2549
2550 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2551
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002552- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2553 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2554 size of the executable.
2555
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002556- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2557 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2558 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2559 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002560
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002561- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2562
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002563- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2564 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2565 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002566
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002567- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2568 well as Unix.
2569
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002570- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2571 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2572 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2573 modules in the README file for details.
2574
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002575C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002576-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002577
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002578- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2579 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002580 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002581 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002582 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002583
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002584- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2585 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2586 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2587 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2588 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2589 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002590 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002591 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2592 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2593 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2594 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2595 aligned.)
2596
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002597- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2598 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2599 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2600
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002601- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2602 level.
2603
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002604- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2605 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2606 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2607 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2608 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2609
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002610- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2611 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2612 code.
2613
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002614- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2615 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2616 adjusting for negative indices.
2617
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002618- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2619 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2620 object.
2621
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002622- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2623 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2624 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2625
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002626- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2627 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002628
2629- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2630
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002631- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2632 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2633 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2634 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2635
2636- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2637
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002638- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002639
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002640- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002641 without going through the buffer API.
2642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002643- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002644
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002645- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2646 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2647 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2648 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2649
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002650- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2651 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2652
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002653- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002654 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2655
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002656New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002657-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002658
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002659- OpenVMS is now supported.
2660
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002661- AtheOS is now supported.
2662
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002663- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2664
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002665- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2666
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002667Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002668-----
2669
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002670- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2671 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2672 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002673
2674Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002675-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002676
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002677- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2678 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2679 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2680 bugs.
2681 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002682 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002683 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2684 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002685 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002686
2687- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002688 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002689
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002690- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2691 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2692
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002693- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2694 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002695 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002696 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2697
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002698- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2699 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2700 use files" uninstall option).
2701
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002702- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2703
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002704- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2705 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2706
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002707- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2708 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2709 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2710
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002711- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2712 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2713 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2714 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2715 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002716 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2717 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2718 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002719
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002720- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002721 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002722 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2723 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2724 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2725 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2726 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2727 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2728 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2729 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2730 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2731 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2732 work around.
2733
2734- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2735 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2736 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2737 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2738 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2739 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2740 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2741 specified with O_CREAT too).
2742
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002743Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002744----
2745
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002746- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002747
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002748- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2749 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2750 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2751
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002752- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2753 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2754 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2755
2756- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2757 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2758 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2759 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2760 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2761 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2762 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2763 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002764
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002765- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2766 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2767 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002768
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002769- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2770 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2771 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2772 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2773 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002774
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002775- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2776 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2777 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002778
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002779- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2780 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002781
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002782- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2783 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2784 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2785 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2786 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002787
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002788- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2789 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2790 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2791
2792- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2793 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2794 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002795
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002796- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2797 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2798 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2799 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002800 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002801
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002802- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2803 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002804
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002805- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2806 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002807
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002808- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002809 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002810 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2811 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002812
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002813
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002814What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002815===============================
2816
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002817*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2818
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002819Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002820--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002821
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002822- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2823 with a custom metaclass.
2824
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002825Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002827
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002828- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2829 are proxies.
2830
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002831Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002832-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002833
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002834- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2835 very short strings.
2836
2837- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2838 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2839 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2840 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2841 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2842
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002843Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002844-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002845
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002846- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2847 close or delete time).
2848
2849- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2850 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2851
2852- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2853
2854- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002855 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002856
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002857Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002858-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002859
2860Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002861-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002862
2863C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002864-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002865
2866New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002867-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002868
2869Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002870-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002871
2872Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002873-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002874
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002875- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2876
2877- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2878 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2879
2880- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2881 deleted at process exit time.
2882
2883- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2884 in backslash.
2885
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002886Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002888
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002889- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2890 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2891 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2892
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002893
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002894What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002895===========================
2896
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002897*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2898
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002899Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002901
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002902- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2903 been extensively updated. See
2904
2905 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2906
2907 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2908
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002909- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2910 deleted!
2911
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002912- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2913 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2914 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2915 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2916 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2917
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002918- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2919
2920 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2921 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2922
2923 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2924 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2925 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2926 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2927 supported anyway.
2928
2929 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2930 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2931
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002932- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2933 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2934 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2935 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2936 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002937
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002938- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2939 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2940 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2941
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002942Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002944
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002945- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2946 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2947 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2948 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2949 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2950 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002951 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2952 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2953 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2954 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002955
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002956- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2957 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2958 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2959
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002960Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002961-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002962
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002963- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2964
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002965Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002967
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002968- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2969 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2970 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2971 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2972 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2973 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2974
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002975- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2976
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002977- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2978
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002979- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2980
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002981- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2982 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2983 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2984
2985- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2986
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002987Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002988-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002989
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002990- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2991 off a search on Google.
2992
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002993Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002994-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002995
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002996- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2997 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2998 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2999 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3000 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3001 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3002 other platforms should do likewise.
3003
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003004- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3005 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3006 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3007
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003008C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003009-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003010
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003011- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3012 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3013 producing key-value pairs.
3014
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003015- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003016 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003017 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3018 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3019 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3020 previously went unchallenged.
3021
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003022New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003023-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003024
3025Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003027
3028Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003030
3031Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003032----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003033
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003034- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3035 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003036
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003037- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3038 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3039 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3040 home.
3041
3042
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003043What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003044===========================
3045
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003046*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3047
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003048Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003049--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003050
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003051- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3052 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003053
3054 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003055 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003056
3057 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3058 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003059 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003060 This needs to be documented.
3061
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003062- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3063 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3064
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003065- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3066 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3067 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3068
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003069- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3070 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3071
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003072- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3073 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3074 class forbids it).
3075
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003076- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3077 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3078 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3079
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003080- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3081
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003082Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003083-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003084
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003085- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3086 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003087 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003088
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003089- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3090 (like 1 + '').
3091
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003092Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003093-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003094
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003095- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3096 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3097 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3098 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003099 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003100 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3101
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003102- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3103 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3104 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3105 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3106
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003107- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3108 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003109 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3110 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3111 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003112
3113- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3114 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003115
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003116- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3117 bytes on its input.
3118
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003119Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003120-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003121
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003122- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003123 convenience function.
3124
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003125- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3126 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3127 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003128 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3129 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3130 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3131 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3132 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3133 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003134
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003135- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3136 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3137 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3138 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3139
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003140- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3141 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3142 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3143
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003144- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3145 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3146 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3147 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3148
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003149- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3150 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003151 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003152 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3153 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3154 new -l and -e options.
3155
3156- statcache is now deprecated.
3157
3158- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3159 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003161 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3162 time properly taken into account.
3163
3164- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3165 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3166 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3167 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3168
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003169Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003170-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003171
3172Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003173-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003174
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003175- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3176 is built with libdb3 if available.
3177
3178- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3179
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003180C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003181-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003182
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003183- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3184 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3185 PySequence_Size().
3186
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003187- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3188
3189- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3190 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3191 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3192
3193- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3194 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3195
3196- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3197 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3198
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003199New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003201
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003202- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3203 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3204
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003205- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3206 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3207
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003208- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3209
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003210Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003211-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003212
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003213- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3214 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3215
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003216Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003218
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003219Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003221
3222- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3223 removed completely in the next release.
3224
3225- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3226 OSX.
3227
3228- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3229 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3230
3231- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3232
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003233
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003234What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003235===========================
3236
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3238
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003239Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003241
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003242- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003243 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003244 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003245 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3246 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003247 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3248 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003249 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3250 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003251
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003252- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3253 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3254
3255- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3256 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3257
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003258Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003259-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003260
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003261- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3262 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3263 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3264 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3265 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3266 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3267 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3268 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3269
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003270- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3271 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3272 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3273 example).
3274
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003275- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003276 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003277 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003278 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003279
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003280- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3281 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3282 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003283 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003284
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003285- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3286 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3287 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3288 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3289 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3290 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3291
3292 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3293
3294 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3295
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003296Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003297-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003298
3299- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3300
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003301- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3302
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003303- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3304 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003305
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003306- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3307 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3308 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3309 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3310 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3311 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003312 attributes.
3313
3314- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3315 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3316 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003317
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003318- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3319 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3320 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003321
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003322- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3323 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3324 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003325 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3326 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3327
3328- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3329 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003330
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003331Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003332-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003333
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003334- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3335 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3336
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003337- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3338 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3339 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3340 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3341
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003342- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3343 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3344 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3345 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3346
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003347 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3348 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3349 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3350 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3351 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3352 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3353 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3354 without losing information).
3355
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003356- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003357 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3358 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3359 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3360 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3361 module).
3362
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003363 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003364 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3365 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3366 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3367 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003368
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003369- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003370 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3371 encoding.
3372
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003373- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3374 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3375
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003376- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003377 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3378
3379- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3380 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3381 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3382 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3383
3384- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3385
3386- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3387 ON, and OFF.
3388
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003389- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3390 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3391
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003392Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003393-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003394
3395- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3396 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3397 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003398
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003399- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3400 been added: -X and -E.
3401
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003402Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003403-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003404
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003405- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3406 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3407
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003408C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003409-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003410
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003411- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3412 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3413 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3414 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3415 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3416
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003417- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3418 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3419 as long) arguments.
3420
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003421- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3422 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3423 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3424 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3425 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3426 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3427
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003428- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3429 input.
3430
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003431New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003432-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003433
3434Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003436
3437Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003439
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003440- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3441 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3442 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3443
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003444- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3445 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3446 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003447 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003448
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3450 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3451 import signal
3452 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003453
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003454 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003455 while 1:
3456 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003457 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003458 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3459 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3460 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3461 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003462
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003463
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003464What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3465===========================
3466
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003467*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3468
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003469Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003471
3472- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3473 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3474 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3475
3476- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3477 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3478 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3479 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3480 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3481 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3482 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003483
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003484- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003485 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003486 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3487 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3488 associate a docstring with a property.
3489
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003490- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3491 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3492 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3493 other built-in object types.
3494
3495- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3496 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3497 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3498 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3499 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3500
3501- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3502 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3503
3504- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3505 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003506 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003507 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3508 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3509 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3510 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3511 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3512
3513- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3514 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3515 class.
3516
3517- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3518 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3519 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3520 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3521
3522- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3523 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3524 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3525 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3526
3527- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3528 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3529
3530- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3531 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3532 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3533 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3534 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003535 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003536 with the same value as s.
3537
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003538- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3539
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003540Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003541----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003542
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003543- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3544
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003545- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3546 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3547 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3548 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3549 objects.
3550
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003551- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3552 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003553 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3554 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3555
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003556- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3557 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3558 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3559
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003560Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003562
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003563- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3564 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3565 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3566 by the instances.
3567
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003568- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3569 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3570 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3571
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003572- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3573 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3574 before the entire comparison is complete.
3575
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003576- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3577 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3578 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3579
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003580- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3581 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3582 getwriter().
3583
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003584- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3585 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3586
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003587- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003588 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3589 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3590
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003591- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3592 iterable object.
3593
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003594- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3595 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003596
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003597- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3598 authentication.
3599
3600- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3601 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003602
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003603- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003604 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3605 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3606 a sample driver.)
3607
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003608Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003609-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003610
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003611- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3612 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3613 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3614 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3615 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3616 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3617 kernel has large file support.
3618
3619- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3620 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3621 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3622 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3623 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3624
3625- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3626 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3627 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3628
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003629C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003631
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003632- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3633 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3634
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003635New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003636-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003637
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003638- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3639 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3640
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003641Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003643
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003644- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3645 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3646 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3647 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3648 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3649
3650- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3651 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3652 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3653 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3654
3655- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3656 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3657
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003658Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003660
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003661- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003662 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3663 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003664
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003665
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003666What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3667===========================
3668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003669*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3670
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003671Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003673
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003674- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3675 big to represent as a C double.
3676
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003677- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3678 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3679 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3680 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3681 restriction).
3682
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003683- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3684 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3685 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3686 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3687 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3688
3689 >>> dir([])
3690 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3691 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3692 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3693 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3694 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3695 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3696 'reverse', 'sort']
3697
3698 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3699
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003700- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003701 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3702 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3703 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3704 OverflowError exception.
3705
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003706- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003707 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003708 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3709 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3710 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3711 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3712 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003713 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003714 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3715 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3716
3717 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3718 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3719 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3720 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003721
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003722- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003723 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3724 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3725 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3726 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3727 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3728 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3729 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3730 once it is created.
3731
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003732- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3733 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3734 (key, value) pairs.
3735
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003736- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003737 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3738 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3739
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003740- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3741 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3742 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3743 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3744 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003745
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003746- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003747 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3748 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3749
3750 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3751
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003752- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003753 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3754
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003755Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003757
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003758- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003759 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3760 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003761
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003762- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3763 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3764 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3765 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3766 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3767 in this area anymore).
3768
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003769- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3770 threading.Timer.
3771
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003772- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3773 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3774
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003775- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003776 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3777
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003778- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003779 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3780 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3781 converted to Python longs.
3782
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003783- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003784 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3785
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003786- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3787 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3788 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3789
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003790Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003792
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003793- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3794 division operators as per PEP 238.
3795
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003796Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003797-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003798
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003799- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3800 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3801 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3802 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3803
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003804C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003806
3807- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003808
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003809- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3810 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003811 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003812
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003813 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3814 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003815 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003816 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003817
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003818- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003819 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3820 module:
3821
3822 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003823
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003824 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3825 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003826
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003827 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3828 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003829
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003830 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3831
3832 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3833
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003834- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003835 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3836 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3837 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003838
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003839New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003841
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003842- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3843 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3844 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3845 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3846 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003847
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003848Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003850
3851Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003852-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003853
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003854- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3855 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3856 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3857 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003858 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3859 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3860 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3861 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3862 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003863
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003864- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003865 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3866
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003867
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003868What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3869===========================
3870
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3872
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003873Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003874-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003875
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003876- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3877 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3878
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003879- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3880 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3881 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003882
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003883- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3884 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3885 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3886 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003887
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003888- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3889
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003890- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003891
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003892Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003894
3895- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003896 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003897 the module docstring for details.
3898
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003899Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003901
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003902- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003903 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3904 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3905 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003906
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003907- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3908 Nick Mathewson.
3909
3910Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003912
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003913- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3914 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3915 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3916 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3917 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3918 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3919 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3920 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3921
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003922- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3923 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3924 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3925 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3926
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003927- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3928 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3929 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3930 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3931 come a long way).
3932
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003933- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3934 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3935 write filters for these warnings).
3936
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003937- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3938 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3939 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3940 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3941 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3942
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003943- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3944 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3945 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3946 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3947 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3948 older distribution.
3949
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003950Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003952
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003953- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3954 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003955 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003956
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003957- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3958 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3959 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3960
3961- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3962
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003963- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3964
3965- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3966
3967- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3968
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003970
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003971- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3972
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003973New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003974-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003975
3976C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003978
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003979- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3980 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3981 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3982 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3983 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3984 against buffer overruns.
3985
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003986- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003987 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3988 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003989 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3990 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3991 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3992
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003993- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3994 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3995 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3996 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3997 deprecated.
3998
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003999Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004001
4002- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4003 relevant is found.
4004
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004005
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004006What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004007===========================
4008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4010
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004011Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004012----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004013
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004014- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4015 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4016 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4017 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4018 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4019 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4020 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4021 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004022 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004023 repaired.
4024
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004025- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004026 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004027 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4028 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4029 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4030 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4031 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4032 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4033 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4034 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4035
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004036- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4037 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4038 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4039 leading BMO character).
4040
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004041- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4042 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4043 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4044
4045 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4046 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4047 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004048
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004049 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4050 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4051 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4052 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4053 for various simple to use conversions.
4054
4055 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4056 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4057
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4059 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4060 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4061 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4062 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4063 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4064 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4065 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4066 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4067 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4068 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4069 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4070 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4071 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4072 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004073
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004074- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4075 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4076 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004077 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004078 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004079
4080 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004081 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4082 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4083 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4084 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4085 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004086 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4087 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004088
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004089 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4090 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4091 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004092 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004093
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004094- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4095 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4096 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4097 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4098 floating arithmetic,
4099
4100 x = 9007199254740992.0
4101 print long(x)
4102
4103 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4104 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4105 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4106 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4107 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4108 functions are of good quality).
4109
4110 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4111 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4112 algorithms to break.
4113
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004114- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4115 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4116 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4117 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4118 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4119 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4120 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4121 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4122 order.
4123
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004124- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4125 operation along the most common code paths.
4126
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004127- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4128 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4129
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004130- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4131 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4132 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4133 {}.update(UserDict())
4134
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004135- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4136 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4137 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4138 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4139 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4140 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4141 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4142 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4143
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004144- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004145 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004147 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004148 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4149 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004150 join() method of strings
4151 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004152 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4153 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004154 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004155 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004156
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004157- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4158 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4159
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004160- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4161 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4162
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004163- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4164 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4165 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4166 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4167
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004168- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4169 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004170 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004171 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4172 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004173
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004174- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4175
4176
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004177Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004179
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004180- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004181 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004182 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4183 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4184
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004185- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4186 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4187
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004188- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4189 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4190 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4191 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4192
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004193- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4194 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4195 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4196
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004197- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4198
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004199- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4200
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004201- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4202 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4203 that are still imported into string.py).
4204
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004205- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4206
4207- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4208 Now it does.
4209
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004210- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4211
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004212- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4213 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4214 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4215 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4216 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004217 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4218 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004219
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004220- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4221 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4222 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4223 'help(object)'.
4224
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004225Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004227
4228- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004229 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004230 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4231 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4232
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004233- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004234 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4235 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004236
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004237C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004238-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004239
4240- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4241 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004242
4243----
4244
4245**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**