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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
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Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
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Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00008=================================
9
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000010*XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX*
11
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000012Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000013--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000014
Just van Rossum3eb166b2002-11-29 20:47:40 +000015- Exposed the PyImport_FrozenModules variable in import.c through
16 imp.get_frozenmodules() and imp.set_frozenmodules(). This is
17 useful for freezing tools written in Python that use Python for
18 bootstrapping the frozen application.
19
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +000020- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
21
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000022- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
23 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000024 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +000025 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +000026 a different meaning than before.
27
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +000028- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
29 integer range, so int("4"*1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
30 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000031
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +000032- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000033 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +000034 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000035
36- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
37 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
38 and deallocation.
39
40- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
41 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
42
43- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
44 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
45 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
46 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
47 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
48
49- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
50 now detected by the garbage collector.
51
52- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
53 [SF bug 519621]
54
55- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
56 identifier.
57
58- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
59 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
60 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
61 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
62 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
63 [SF bug 563060]
64
65- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
66 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
67 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
68 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
69 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
70
71- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
72 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
73 not called. [SF bug #537450]
74
75- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
76
77- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
78 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
79 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
80 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
81 state of the slots would be lost.)
82
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000083Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +000084-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000085
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +000086- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
87 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
88 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
89 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
90 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
91 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
92 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
93 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
94 releases or implementations.
95
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000096- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +000097 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
98 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +000099
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000100- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
101 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
102
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000103- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
104 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
105 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
106
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000107- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
108 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
109
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000110- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
111 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
112 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but not kept up
113 to date).
114
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000115- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
116 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
117 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
118 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
119 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
120
121 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
122 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
123 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
124 pattern.
125
126 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
127 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
128 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
129 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
130
131 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
132 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
133 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
134 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
135 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
136 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
137
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000138 - The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
139 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
140 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables. In
141 addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
Neal Norwitz7165af22002-09-05 21:42:24 +0000142 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
143 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
144 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
145 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000146
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000147- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
148 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
149 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
150 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
151 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000152 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
153 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
154 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
155 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
156 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
157 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
158 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000159
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000160- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
161 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
162
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000163- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
164 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
165 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
166 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
167 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
168 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
169 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
170 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
171 to Zack Weinberg!
172
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000173- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
174 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
175 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
176 type. This has been fixed now.
177
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000178- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
179 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
180 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
181
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000182- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
183 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
184 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
185 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
186 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
187 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
188 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
189 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000190 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000191
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000192- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
193 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
194 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000195
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000196- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
197 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
198 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
199 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
200 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
201 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
202 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
203 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000204 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000205 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
206 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
207
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000208- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
209 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
210 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
211 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
212 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
213 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
214 this.)
215
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000216- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
217 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000218 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000219 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000220 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
221 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000222 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
223 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000224
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000225- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
226 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
227 currently running.
228
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000229- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
230 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
231 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
232 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
233
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000234- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
235 as directory names.
236
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000237- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
238 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
239
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000240- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
241 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
242
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000243- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000244 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
245 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000246
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000247- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
248 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
249 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
250 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
251 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
252
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000253- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
254 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
255 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
256 removed.
257
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000258- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
259 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
260 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
261
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000262- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
263 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
264 to __debug__.
265
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000266- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
267 string to the left with zeros. For example,
268 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
269
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000270- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
271 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
272 deprecated now.
273
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000274- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
275 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
276 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000277
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000278- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
279 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
280 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
281 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
282 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000283
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000284- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
285 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
286
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000287- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
288 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
289 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000290 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000291 is backward compatible.
292
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000293- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
294 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
295 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
296 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
297 could access a pointer to freed memory.
298
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000299- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
300 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
301 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
302 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
303 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
304 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000305
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000306- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
307 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
308
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000309- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
310 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
311
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000312- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
313 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
314 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
315 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
316 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
317
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000318- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
319 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
320 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
321
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000322- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000323 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
324
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000325Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000326-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000327
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000328- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
329 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
330 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000331 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000332
Andrew M. Kuchling50905d02002-11-26 12:31:09 +0000333- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has been
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000334 added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is still
335 available in source code, but not built automatically anymore, and
336 is now named bsddb185.
337
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000338- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
339 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000340
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000341- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
342
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000343- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
344 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
345
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000346- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
347 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
348 supported.
349
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000350- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
351
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000352- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
353 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000354
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000355- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
356 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
357
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000358- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
359
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000360- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
361 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
362
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000363- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
364 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
365 functions but callable type objects.
366
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000367- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000368 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000369 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000370
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000371- posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been
372 added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000373
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000374- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
375 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000376
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000377- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
378 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
379 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
380 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
381
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000382- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
383 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000384
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000385- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
386 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
387 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
388 and __imul__.
389
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000390- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000391 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
392 is called.
393
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000394- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
395 been added where available.
396
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000397- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
398 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
399 interpreter was compiled.
400
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000401- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
402 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
403 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000404 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000405 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
406 1, not 2.
407
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000408- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
409 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
410 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
411 limit.
412
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000413- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
414 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
415 bug #623464.
416
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000417Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000418-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000419
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000420- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
421 test the current module.
422
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000423- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
424 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
425 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
426 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
427 this behavior needs to be controlled.
428
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000429- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000430 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000431 Ward's Optik package.
432
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000433- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
434 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
435 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
436 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
437
438- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
439 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000440 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000441
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000442- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
443 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
444
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000445- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
446 modules are iterators now.
447
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000448- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
449 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
450 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
451 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
452 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
453 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000454
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000455- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
456 with their entity value.
457
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000458- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
459
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000460- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
461 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000462
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000463- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
464 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000465 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000466
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000467- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
468 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
469 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
470 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
471 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
472 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
473 main():
474
475 import locale
476 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
477
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000478- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
479 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
480
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000481- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
482 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
483 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
484 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
485 to the new standard.
486
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000487- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
488 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
489 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
490 an extension to the database.
491
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000492- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
493 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
494 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
495 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
496 is the base class of the two. (This is not documented yet, but
497 help(sets) gives a wealth of information.)
498
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000499- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
500
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000501- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000502 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000503
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000504- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
505 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
506 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
507 bounded integers.
508
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000509- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
510 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
511 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
512
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000513- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
514
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000515- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
516 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
517 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
518 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
519
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000520- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
521 argument.
522
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000523- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
524 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
525 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
526 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
527 [SF patch 560794].
528
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000529- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
530 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
531 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000532 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
533 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
534 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000535
536- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
537 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000538
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000539- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
540 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
541 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
542 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000543
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000544- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
545 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
546 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
547 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
548 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
549
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000550- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000551
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000552- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
553 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
554 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
555 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
556 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
557 identical to None.
558
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000559- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
560 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
561 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
562 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
563 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
564 results now.
565
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000566- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
567 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
568
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000569- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
570 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
571 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
572 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
573 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
574 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
575 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
576 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
577
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000578- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
579
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000580- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
581 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
582
583- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
584 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
585 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
586 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
587 and other systems.
588
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000589- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
590 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
591 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
592 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 +0000593 work well with these.
594
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000595- compileall now supports quiet operation.
596
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000597- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000598 connections.
599
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000600- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
601 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
602 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
603
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000604- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
605 sets
606
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000607- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
608 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
609 name.
610
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000611- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
612 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
613 passed in.
614
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000615- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000616 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000617 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
618 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000619
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000620- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
621
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000622- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
623
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000624- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
625 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
626 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
627
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000628- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
629 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
630 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
631 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
632 honored.
633
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000634- distutils' build_ext command now links c++ extensions with the c++
635 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
636 running under *nix.
637
638- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
639 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
640 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
641
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000642- New pdb command `pp' which is like `p' except that it pretty-prints
643 the value of its expression argument.
644
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000645- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
646 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
647 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
648
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000649- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
650 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
651 skipstone browser was included.
652
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000653Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000654-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000655
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000656- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
657 names in addition to accepting file names.
658
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000659- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
660 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
661 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
662 still used and useful.)
663
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000664- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
665 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
666 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
667 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000668
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000669- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
670 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
671 the generated binary.
672
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000673Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000674-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000675
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000676- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
677
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000678- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
679 except in the hands of experts.
680
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000681- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000682 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
683 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
684 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000685
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000686- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
687 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
688 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
689 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
690 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
691 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
692 builds.
693
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000694- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
695 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
696 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
697 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
698 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
699 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
700 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
701 new type.
702
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000703- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000704
705 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
706 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
707 positive infinities.
708
709 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
710 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
711 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
712 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
713 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
714 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
715 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
716
717 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
718
719 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
720
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000721- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
722 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
723 size of the executable.
724
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000725- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
726 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
727 configure script. On other platforms, remove
728 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000729
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000730- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
731
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000732- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
733 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
734 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000735
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000736- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
737 well as Unix.
738
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000739- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
740 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
741 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
742 modules in the README file for details.
743
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000744C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000745-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000746
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000747- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
748 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000749 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000750 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000751 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000752
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000753- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
754 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
755 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
756 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
757 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
758 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
759 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
760 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
761 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
762 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
763 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
764 aligned.)
765
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000766- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
767 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
768 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
769
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000770- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
771 level.
772
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000773- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
774 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
775 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
776 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
777 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
778
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000779- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
780 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
781 code.
782
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000783- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
784 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
785 adjusting for negative indices.
786
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000787- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
788 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
789 object.
790
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000791- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
792 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
793 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
794
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000795- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
796 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000797
798- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
799
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000800- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
801 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
802 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
803 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
804
805- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
806
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000807- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000808
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000809- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000810 without going through the buffer API.
811
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000812- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000813
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000814- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
815 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
816 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
817 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
818
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000819- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
820 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
821
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000822- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000823 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
824
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000825New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000826-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000827
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000828- AtheOS is now supported.
829
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000830- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
831
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000832- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
833
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000834Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000835-----
836
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +0000837- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
838 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
839 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000840
841Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000842-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000843
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000844- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
845 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
846 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
847 bugs.
848 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +0000849 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
850 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
851 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +0000852 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
853
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +0000854- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
855 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
856
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +0000857- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
858 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
859 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
860 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
861
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000862- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
863 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
864 use files" uninstall option).
865
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000866- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
867
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000868- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
869 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
870
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000871- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
872 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
873 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
874
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000875- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
876 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
877 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
878 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
879 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000880 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
881 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
882 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000883
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000884- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000885 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000886 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
887 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
888 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
889 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
890 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
891 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
892 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
893 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
894 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
895 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
896 work around.
897
898- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
899 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
900 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
901 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
902 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
903 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
904 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
905 specified with O_CREAT too).
906
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000907Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000908----
909
910Yet to be written.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000911
912
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000913What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000914===============================
915
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000916*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
917
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000918Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000919--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000920
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000921- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
922 with a custom metaclass.
923
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000924Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000925-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000926
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000927- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
928 are proxies.
929
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000930Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000931-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000932
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000933- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
934 very short strings.
935
936- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
937 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
938 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
939 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
940 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
941
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000942Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000943-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000944
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000945- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
946 close or delete time).
947
948- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
949 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
950
951- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
952
953- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000954 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000955
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000956Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000957-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000958
959Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000960-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000961
962C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000963-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000964
965New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000966-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000967
968Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000969-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000970
971Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000972-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000973
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000974- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
975
976- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
977 instances are deleted at process exit time.
978
979- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
980 deleted at process exit time.
981
982- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
983 in backslash.
984
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000985Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000986----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000987
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000988- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
989 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
990 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
991
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000992
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +0000993What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000994===========================
995
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000996*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
997
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000998Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000999--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001000
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001001- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1002 been extensively updated. See
1003
1004 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1005
1006 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1007
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001008- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1009 deleted!
1010
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001011- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1012 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1013 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1014 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1015 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1016
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001017- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1018
1019 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1020 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1021
1022 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1023 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1024 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1025 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1026 supported anyway.
1027
1028 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1029 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1030
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001031- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1032 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1033 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1034 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1035 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001036
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001037- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1038 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1039 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1040
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001041Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001042-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001043
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001044- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1045 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1046 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1047 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1048 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1049 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001050 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1051 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1052 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1053 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001054
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001055- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1056 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1057 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1058
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001059Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001060-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001061
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001062- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1063
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001064Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001065-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001066
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001067- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1068 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1069 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1070 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1071 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1072 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1073
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001074- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1075
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001076- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1077
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001078- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1079
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001080- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1081 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1082 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1083
1084- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1085
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001086Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001087-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001088
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001089- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1090 off a search on Google.
1091
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001092Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001093-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001094
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001095- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1096 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1097 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1098 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1099 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1100 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1101 other platforms should do likewise.
1102
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001103- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1104 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1105 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1106
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001107C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001108-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001109
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001110- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1111 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1112 producing key-value pairs.
1113
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001114- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001115 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001116 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1117 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1118 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1119 previously went unchallenged.
1120
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001121New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001122-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001123
1124Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001125-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001126
1127Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001128-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001129
1130Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001131----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001132
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001133- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1134 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001135
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001136- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1137 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1138 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1139 home.
1140
1141
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001142What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001143===========================
1144
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001145*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1146
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001147Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001148--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001149
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001150- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1151 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001152
1153 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001154 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001155
1156 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1157 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001158 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001159 This needs to be documented.
1160
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001161- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1162 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1163
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001164- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1165 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1166 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1167
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001168- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1169 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1170
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001171- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1172 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1173 class forbids it).
1174
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001175- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1176 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1177 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1178
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001179- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1180
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001181Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001182-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001183
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001184- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1185 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001186 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001187
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001188- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1189 (like 1 + '').
1190
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001191Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001192-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001193
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001194- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1195 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1196 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1197 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001198 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001199 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1200
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001201- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1202 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1203 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1204 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1205
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001206- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1207 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001208 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1209 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1210 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001211
1212- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1213 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001214
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001215- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1216 bytes on its input.
1217
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001218Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001219-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001220
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001221- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001222 convenience function.
1223
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001224- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1225 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1226 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001227 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1228 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1229 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1230 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1231 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1232 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001233
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001234- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1235 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1236 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1237 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1238
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001239- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1240 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1241 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1242
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001243- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1244 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1245 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1246 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1247
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001248- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1249 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001250 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001251 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1252 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1253 new -l and -e options.
1254
1255- statcache is now deprecated.
1256
1257- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1258 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001259 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001260 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1261 time properly taken into account.
1262
1263- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1264 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1265 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1266 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1267
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001268Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001269-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001270
1271Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001272-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001273
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001274- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1275 is built with libdb3 if available.
1276
1277- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1278
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001279C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001280-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001281
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001282- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1283 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1284 PySequence_Size().
1285
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001286- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1287
1288- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1289 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1290 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1291
1292- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1293 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1294
1295- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1296 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1297
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001298New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001299-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001300
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001301- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1302 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1303
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001304- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1305 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1306
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001307- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1308
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001309Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001310-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001311
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001312- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1313 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1314
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001315Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001316-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001317
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001318Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001319----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001320
1321- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1322 removed completely in the next release.
1323
1324- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1325 OSX.
1326
1327- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1328 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1329
1330- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1331
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001332
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001333What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001334===========================
1335
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001336*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1337
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001338Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001339--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001340
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001341- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001342 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001343 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001344 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1345 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001346 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1347 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001348 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1349 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001350
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001351- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1352 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1353
1354- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1355 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1356
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001357Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001358-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001359
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001360- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1361 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1362 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1363 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1364 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1365 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1366 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1367 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1368
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001369- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1370 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1371 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1372 example).
1373
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001374- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001375 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001376 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001377 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001378
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001379- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1380 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1381 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001382 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001383
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001384- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1385 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1386 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1387 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1388 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1389 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1390
1391 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1392
1393 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1394
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001395Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001396-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001397
1398- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1399
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001400- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1401
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001402- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1403 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001404
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001405- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1406 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1407 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1408 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1409 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1410 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001411 attributes.
1412
1413- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1414 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1415 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001416
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001417- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1418 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1419 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001420
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001421- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1422 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1423 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001424 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1425 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1426
1427- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1428 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001429
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001430Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001431-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001432
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001433- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1434 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1435
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001436- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1437 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1438 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1439 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1440
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001441- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1442 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1443 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1444 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1445
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001446 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1447 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1448 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1449 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1450 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1451 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1452 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1453 without losing information).
1454
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001455- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001456 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1457 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1458 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1459 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1460 module).
1461
1462 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1463 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1464 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1465 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1466 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001467
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001468- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001469 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1470 encoding.
1471
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001472- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1473 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1474
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001475- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001476 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1477
1478- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1479 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1480 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1481 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1482
1483- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1484
1485- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1486 ON, and OFF.
1487
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001488- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1489 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1490
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001491Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001492-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001493
1494- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1495 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1496 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001497
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001498- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1499 been added: -X and -E.
1500
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001501Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001502-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001503
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001504- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1505 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1506
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001507C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001508-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001509
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001510- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1511 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1512 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1513 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1514 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1515
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001516- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1517 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1518 as long) arguments.
1519
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001520- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1521 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1522 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1523 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1524 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1525 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1526
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001527- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1528 input.
1529
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001530New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001531-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001532
1533Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001534-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001535
1536Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001537-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001538
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001539- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1540 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1541 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1542
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001543- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1544 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1545 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001546 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001547
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001548 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1549 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1550 import signal
1551 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001552
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001553 try:
1554 while 1:
1555 pass
1556 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1557 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1558 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1559 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1560 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001561
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001562
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001563What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1564===========================
1565
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001566*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1567
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001568Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001569--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001570
1571- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1572 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1573 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1574
1575- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1576 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1577 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1578 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1579 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1580 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1581 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001582
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001583- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001584 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001585 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1586 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1587 associate a docstring with a property.
1588
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001589- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1590 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1591 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1592 other built-in object types.
1593
1594- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1595 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1596 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1597 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1598 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1599
1600- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1601 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1602
1603- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1604 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001605 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001606 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1607 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1608 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1609 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1610 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1611
1612- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1613 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1614 class.
1615
1616- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1617 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1618 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1619 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1620
1621- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1622 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1623 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1624 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1625
1626- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1627 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1628
1629- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1630 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1631 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1632 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1633 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001634 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001635 with the same value as s.
1636
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001637- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1638
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001639Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001640----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001641
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001642- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1643
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001644- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1645 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1646 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1647 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1648 objects.
1649
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001650- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1651 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001652 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1653 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1654
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001655- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1656 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1657 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1658
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001659Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001660-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001661
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001662- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1663 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1664 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1665 by the instances.
1666
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001667- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1668 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1669 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1670
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001671- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1672 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1673 before the entire comparison is complete.
1674
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001675- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1676 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1677 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1678
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001679- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1680 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1681 getwriter().
1682
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001683- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1684 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1685
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001686- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001687 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1688 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1689
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001690- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1691 iterable object.
1692
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001693- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1694 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001695
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001696- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1697 authentication.
1698
1699- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1700 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001701
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001702- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001703 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1704 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1705 a sample driver.)
1706
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001707Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001708-----
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001709
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001710Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001711-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001712
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001713- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1714 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1715 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1716 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1717 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1718 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1719 kernel has large file support.
1720
1721- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1722 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1723 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1724 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1725 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1726
1727- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1728 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1729 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1730
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001731C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001732-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001733
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001734- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1735 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1736
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001737New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001738-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001739
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001740- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1741 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1742
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001743Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001744-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001745
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001746- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1747 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1748 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1749 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1750 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1751
1752- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1753 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1754 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1755 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1756
1757- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1758 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1759
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001760Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001761-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001762
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001763- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001764 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1765 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001766
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001767
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001768What's New in Python 2.2a3?
1769===========================
1770
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001771*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
1772
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001773Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001774----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001775
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001776- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1777 big to represent as a C double.
1778
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001779- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1780 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1781 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1782 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1783 restriction).
1784
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001785- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1786 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1787 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1788 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1789 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1790
1791 >>> dir([])
1792 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1793 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1794 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1795 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1796 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1797 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1798 'reverse', 'sort']
1799
1800 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1801
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001802- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001803 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1804 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1805 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1806 OverflowError exception.
1807
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001808- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001809 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001810 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1811 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1812 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1813 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1814 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001815 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001816 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
1817 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
1818
1819 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1820 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1821 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1822 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001823
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001824- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001825 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1826 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1827 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1828 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1829 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1830 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1831 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1832 once it is created.
1833
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001834- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1835 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1836 (key, value) pairs.
1837
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001838- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001839 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1840 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1841
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001842- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1843 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1844 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1845 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1846 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001847
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001848- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001849 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1850 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1851
1852 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1853
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001854- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001855 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1856
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001857Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001858-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001859
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001860- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00001861 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
1862 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001863
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001864- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1865 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1866 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1867 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1868 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1869 in this area anymore).
1870
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001871- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1872 threading.Timer.
1873
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001874- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1875 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1876
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001877- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001878 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1879
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001880- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001881 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1882 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1883 converted to Python longs.
1884
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001885- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001886 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1887
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001888- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1889 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1890 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1891
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001892Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001893-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001894
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001895- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1896 division operators as per PEP 238.
1897
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001898Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001899-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001900
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001901- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1902 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1903 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
1904 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
1905
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001906C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001907-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001908
1909- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001910
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001911- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
1912 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001913 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001914
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001915 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
1916 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
1917 /* The conversion failed. */
1918 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001919
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001920- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001921 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
1922 module:
1923
1924 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001925
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001926 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
1927 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001928
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001929 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
1930 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001931
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001932 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
1933
1934 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
1935
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001936- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001937 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
1938 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1939 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001940
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001941New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001942-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001943
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001944- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1945 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1946 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1947 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1948 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001949
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001950Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001951-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001952
1953Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001954-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001955
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001956- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1957 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1958 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1959 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001960 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1961 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1962 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1963 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1964 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001965
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001966- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001967 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1968
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001969
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001970What's New in Python 2.2a2?
1971===========================
1972
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001973*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
1974
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001975Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001976-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001977
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00001978- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
1979 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
1980
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001981- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
1982 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
1983 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001984
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00001985- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
1986 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
1987 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
1988 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001989
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001990- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
1991
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001992- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001993
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001994Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001995-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001996
1997- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00001998 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001999 the module docstring for details.
2000
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002001Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002002-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002003
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002004- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002005 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2006 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2007 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002008
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002009- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2010 Nick Mathewson.
2011
2012Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002013----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002014
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002015- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2016 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2017 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2018 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2019 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2020 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2021 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2022 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2023
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002024- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2025 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2026 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2027 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2028
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002029- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2030 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2031 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2032 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2033 come a long way).
2034
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002035- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2036 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2037 write filters for these warnings).
2038
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002039- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2040 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2041 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2042 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2043 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2044
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002045- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2046 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2047 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2048 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2049 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2050 older distribution.
2051
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002052Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002053-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002054
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002055- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2056 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002057 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002058
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002059- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2060 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2061 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2062
2063- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2064
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002065- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2066
2067- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2068
2069- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2070
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002071- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002072
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002073- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2074
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002075New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002077
2078C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002079-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002080
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002081- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2082 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2083 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2084 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2085 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2086 against buffer overruns.
2087
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002088- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002089 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2090 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002091 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2092 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2093 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2094
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002095- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2096 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2097 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2098 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2099 deprecated.
2100
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002101Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002102-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002103
2104- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2105 relevant is found.
2106
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002107
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002108What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002109===========================
2110
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002111*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2112
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002113Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002114----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002115
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002116- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2117 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2118 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2119 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2120 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2121 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2122 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2123 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002124 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002125 repaired.
2126
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002127- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002128 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002129 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2130 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2131 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2132 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2133 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2134 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2135 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2136 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2137
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002138- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2139 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2140 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2141 leading BMO character).
2142
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002143- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2144 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2145 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2146
2147 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2148 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2149 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002150
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002151 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2152 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2153 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2154 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2155 for various simple to use conversions.
2156
2157 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2158 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2159
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002160 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2161 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2162 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2163 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2164 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2165 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2166 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2167 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2168 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2169 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2170 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2171 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2172 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2173 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2174 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002175
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002176- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2177 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2178 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002179 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002180 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002181
2182 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002183 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2184 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2185 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2186 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2187 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002188 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2189 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002190
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002191 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2192 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2193 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002194 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002195
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002196- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2197 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2198 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2199 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2200 floating arithmetic,
2201
2202 x = 9007199254740992.0
2203 print long(x)
2204
2205 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2206 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2207 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2208 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2209 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2210 functions are of good quality).
2211
2212 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2213 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2214 algorithms to break.
2215
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002216- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2217 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2218 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2219 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2220 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2221 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2222 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2223 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2224 order.
2225
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002226- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2227 operation along the most common code paths.
2228
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002229- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2230 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2231
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002232- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2233 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2234 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2235 {}.update(UserDict())
2236
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002237- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2238 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2239 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2240 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2241 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2242 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2243 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2244 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2245
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002246- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002247 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002248
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002249 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002250 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2251 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002252 join() method of strings
2253 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002254 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2255 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002256 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002257 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002258
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002259- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2260 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2261
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002262- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2263 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2264
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002265- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2266 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2267 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2268 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2269
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002270- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2271 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002272 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002273 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2274 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002275
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002276- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2277
2278
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002279Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002280-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002281
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002282- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002283 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002284 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2285 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2286
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002287- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2288 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2289
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002290- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2291 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2292 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2293 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2294
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002295- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2296 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2297 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2298
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002299- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2300
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002301- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2302
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002303- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2304 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2305 that are still imported into string.py).
2306
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002307- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2308
2309- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2310 Now it does.
2311
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002312- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2313
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002314- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2315 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2316 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2317 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2318 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002319 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2320 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002321
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002322- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2323 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2324 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2325 'help(object)'.
2326
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002327Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002328-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002329
2330- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002331 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002332 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2333 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2334
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002335- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002336 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2337 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002338
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002339C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002340-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002341
2342- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2343 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002344
2345----
2346
2347**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**