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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000015- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
16 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
17 be there.
18
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000019- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
20 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
21 the LC_NUMERIC category.
22
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000023- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
24 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
25 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
26
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000027- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
28
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000029- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
30 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
31 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000032
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000033- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
34 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
35
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000036- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
37
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000038- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
39 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
40
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000041- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
42
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000043- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
44
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000045- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
46 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
47
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000048- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
49 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
50 Fixes bug #858016 .
51
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000052- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
53 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
54 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
55
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000056- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
57 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
58 improves their performance (about 35%).
59
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000060- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
61 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
62 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
63
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000064- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
65 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
66 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
67 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
68
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000069- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
70 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
71 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
72 length is not known).
73
74- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
75 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000076 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
77 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000078 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
79
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000080- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
81 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
82
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000083- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
84 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
85 keyword arguments.
86
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000087- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
88 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
89 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
90
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000091- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
92 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
93 cases.
94
95- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
96 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
97 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
98 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
99 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
100 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
101 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
102 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
103 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
104 a release build.
105
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000106- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
107 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
108
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000109- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000110 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000111
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000112- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
113 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
114 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
115 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
116 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
117 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
118 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
119 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
120 destroyed.
121
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000122- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
123 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
124 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
125 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
126 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
127 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
128 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
129 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
130
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000131- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
132 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
133 character other than a space.
134
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000135- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
136 by the function object or by the method object, the function
137 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
138 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
139 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
140 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
141 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
142 attributes with the same name.
143
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000144- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
145 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
146 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
147 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
148 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
149 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
150 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
151 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
152 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
153 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
154 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
155 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
156 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
157 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000158
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000159- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
160 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
161 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
162 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
163 This has been repaired.
164
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000165- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
166
167- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
168
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000169- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
170 over a sequence.
171
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000172- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000173 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000174
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000175- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
176
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000177- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
178 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
179 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
180 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
181 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
182 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
183 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
184 records with equal keys is unchanged).
185
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000186- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
187 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
188 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
189
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000190- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
191 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
192 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
193 freelist.
194
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000195- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
196 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
197
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000198- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
199 number.
200
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000201- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
202 a TypeError exception.
203
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000204- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
205 820195.
206
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000207- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
208 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
209 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
210
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000211- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
212 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
213 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000214
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000215- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
216 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
217 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
218
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000219- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
220 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000221 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000222
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000223- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000224 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
225 the first call.
226
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000227
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000228Extension modules
229-----------------
230
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000231- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
232
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000233- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
234
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000235- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
236 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
237
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000238- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
239 fewer false positives.
240
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000241- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
242 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
243
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000244- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
245 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
246
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000247- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
248 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000249 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
250 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
251 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000252
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000253- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
254 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
255 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
256 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
257
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000258- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
259 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
260 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
261 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
262 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
263 #897625.
264
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000265- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
266 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
267
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000268- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
269 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
270 and pops on either side of the deque.
271
272- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
273 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
274
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000275- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
276 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
277 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
278 other functions that expect a function argument.
279
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000280- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
281
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000282- os.getsid was added.
283
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000284- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
285 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
286 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
287
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000288- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
289
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000290- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
291
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000292- readline.clear_history was added.
293
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000294- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
295
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000296- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
297
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000298- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
299
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000300- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
301
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000302- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
303
304- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
305
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000306- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
307
308- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
309
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000310- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
311 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
312 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
313
314- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
315 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
316 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
317 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
318 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
319 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
320 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
321
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000322- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
323 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
324 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
325 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000326
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000327- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
328 iterators from a single iterable.
329
330- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
331 of raising a TypeError exception.
332
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000333- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
334 as parameter.
335
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000336Library
337-------
338
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000339- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
340
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000341- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
342 on cygwin and mingw32.
343
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000344- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
345
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000346- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
347 module.
348
Martin v. Löwiseac324b2004-06-03 09:18:35 +0000349- asyncore.loop now has repeat count parameter that defaults to infinity.
350
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000351- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
352 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
353 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
354
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000355- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
356 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
357 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
358
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000359- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
360
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000361- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
362
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000363- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
364 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
365
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000366- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
367 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
368 type pattern with the same value exists.
369
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000370- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
371 when run from the command prompt).
372
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000373- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
374 not taken into consideration when caching value.
375
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000376- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
377 default sort).
378
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000379- Added global runctx function to profile module
380
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000381- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
382
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000383- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
384
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000385- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
386
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000387- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
388 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
389 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
390 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
391 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
392 accordingly.
393
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000394- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
395 decoding standards.
396
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000397- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
398 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
399 called for all requests.
400
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000401- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
402 they are passed to the compiler.
403
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000404- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
405 indent, width and depth.
406
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000407- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
408 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
409
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000410- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
411 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
412
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000413- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
414
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000415- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
416
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000417- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
418
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000419- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
420 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
421
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000422- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000423 for better performance.
424
425- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000426
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000427- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
428 a string).
429
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000430- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
431
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000432- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
433
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000434- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
435
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000436- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
437
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000438- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
439 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
440 list of fieldnames.
441
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000442- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
443 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
444
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000445- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
446
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000447- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
448 empty lists.
449
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000450- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
451 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
452 and shelves.
453
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000454- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
455 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
456
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000457- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000458 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
459 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000460
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000461- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
462 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000463 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000464
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000465- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000466 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
467 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
468
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000469- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
470 and removed in Py2.4.
471
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000472- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
473
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000474- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
475
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000476Tools/Demos
477-----------
478
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000479- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
480 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
481
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000482- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
483
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000484- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
485 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
486 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
487 destination in situations where both files are given.
488
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000489- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
490 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
491 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
492 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
493
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000494- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
495
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000496- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
497 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
498 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
499 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
500 now.
501
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000502- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
503 in effect
504
505- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
506 C-c C-h
507
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000508- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
509 -d option was given.
510
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000511Build
512-----
513
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000514- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
515 is configured --with-tsc.
516
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000517- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
518 on AMD64.
519
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000520- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
521 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
522
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000523- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
524 removed.
525
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000526- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
527 supported (see PEP 11).
528
529- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
530
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000531- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
532
533- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
534 (see PEP 11).
535
536- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
537 sizeof(char) must be 1.
538
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000539C API
540-----
541
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000542- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
543 generator objects.
544
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000545- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
546 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000547 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
548 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000549
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000550- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
551 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
552
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000553- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
554 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
555 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
556 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
557 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
558
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000559- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
560 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
561 about 10% faster.
562
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000563- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
564 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
565
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000566- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
567 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
568 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
569 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
570
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000571New platforms
572-------------
573
574Tests
575-----
576
577Windows
578-------
579
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000580- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
581 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
582 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
583 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
584
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000585- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
586 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
587 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
588
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000589Mac
590----
591
592
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000593What's New in Python 2.3 final?
594===============================
595
596*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
597
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000598IDLE
599----
600
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000601- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
602 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
603 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
604 context-menu actions.
605
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000606- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
607 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
608 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
609 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
610 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
611 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
612 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
613 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
614 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
615
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000616
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000617What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
618=============================================
619
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000620*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000621
622Core and builtins
623-----------------
624
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000625- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000626 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000627 comment at the end are still unsupported.
628
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000629Extension modules
630-----------------
631
632- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
633 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
634 than once. This has been fixed.
635
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000636- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
637 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
638 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
639 call.
640
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000641- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
642
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000643Library
644-------
645
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000646- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
647 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
648
649- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
650 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
651 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
652 restored.
653
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000654IDLE
655----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000656
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000657- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000658
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000659Build
660-----
661
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000662- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
663 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
664
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000665C API
666-----
667
668Windows
669-------
670
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000671- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
672 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
673
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000674- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
675
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000676Mac
677---
678
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000679- Various fixes to pimp.
680
681- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
682
683- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
684 more problems than it solves.
685
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000686
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000687What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
688=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000689
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000690*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
691
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000692Core and builtins
693-----------------
694
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000695- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
696 by sys.setcheckinterval().
697
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000698- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
699 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000700 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000701
702- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
703 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
704 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000705 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000706
707- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
708 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000709
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000710- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
711 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
712 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
713
714- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000715 770247.
716
717- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000718
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000719Extension modules
720-----------------
721
722- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
723 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
724
725- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
726
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000727- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
728
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000729- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
730 contained within the _strptime module.
731
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000732- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
733 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
734
735- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000736 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
737
738- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
739 the find_class attribute, if present.
740
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000741- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000742
743 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
744 (SF bug 763298).
745
746 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000747 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
748 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
749 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000750
751 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
752
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000753Library
754-------
755
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000756- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
757
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000758- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
759 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
760 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
761 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
762 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
763 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
764 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
765 or Tester().
766
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000767- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
768 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
769 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
770 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
771 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
772 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
773 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
774 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
775 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000776
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000777 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000778
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000779- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
780 weren't before was an oversight.
781
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000782- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
783 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
784
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000785- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
786 when there are no lines.
787
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000788- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
789 which could occur with Tk 8.4
790
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000791- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
792 to child processes.
793
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000794- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
795
796- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
797
798- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
799 xmlrpclib.
800
801- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
802 responses.
803
804- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
805 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
806
807- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
808 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
809 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
810
811- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
812 used as patterns.
813
814- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
815 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
816 than Tk 8.3.
817
818- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
819
820- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000821
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000822Tools/Demos
823-----------
824
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000825- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
826
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000827- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
828
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000829- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000830
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000831Build
832-----
833
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000834- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
835
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000836- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
837
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000838- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
839 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000840
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000841- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
842 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
843 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000844
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000845C API
846-----
847
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000848- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
849 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
850
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000851Windows
852-------
853
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000854- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
855 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
856 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
857 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
858 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
859 Python exception ::
860
861 thread.error: can't start new thread
862
863 is raised now.
864
865- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
866 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
867 instead of from DLL teardown.
868
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000869Mac
870---
871
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000872- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000873 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000874 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
875 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
876 the executable in the bundle.
877
878- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000879
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000880- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
881
882- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
883 on Panther.
884
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000885What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
886================================
887
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000888*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000889
890Core and builtins
891-----------------
892
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000893- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
894 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
895 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
896 with the -i option.
897
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000898- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
899 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
900
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000901- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
902 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
903
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000904- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
905 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
906 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
907 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
908 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
909 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
910 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
911 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
912 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
913 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
914 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
915 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
916 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000917
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000918- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
919 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
920 embedded in a lambda expression.
921
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000922- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
923 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
924 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
925 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
926 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
927
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000928- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
929 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
930 matches the restriction on classic classes.
931
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000932- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
933 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
934
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000935- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
936 It's writable again.
937
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000938- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
939 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
940 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000941 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000942
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000943- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
944 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
945 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
946
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000947Extension modules
948-----------------
949
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000950- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
951 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
952
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000953- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
954 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
955 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
956 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
957
958- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
959 collection.
960
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000961- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
962 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
963 unique within a single program run.
964
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000965- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
966 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
967
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000968- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
969 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
970
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000971- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
972 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000973
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000974- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
975
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000976- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
977 Fixes SF bug #730685.
978
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000979- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
980 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
981 for many BSD-derived systems.
982
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000983
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000984Library
985-------
986
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000987- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
988 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
989 primary ones:
990
991 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
992 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
993 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
994
995 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
996 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
997 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
998 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
999 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1000 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1001
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001002- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1003 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1004 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1005 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1006 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1007 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1008 argument.
1009
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001010- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1011 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1012 in the archive.
1013
1014- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1015 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1016
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001017- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1018 569574).
1019
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001020- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1021 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1022 no more.
1023
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001024- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1025 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1026 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1027 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1028 code coverage.
1029
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001030- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1031 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1032 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001033 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1034 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001035
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001036- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1037 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1038 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001039 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001040
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001041- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1042
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001043- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1044 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1045 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1046 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1047
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001048- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1049 handling.
1050
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001051- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1052 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1053
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001054- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1055 in socket.py.
1056
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001057- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1058
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001059- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1060 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1061 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1062 opener with proxy support.
1063
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001064- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1065
1066- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1067
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001068Tools/Demos
1069-----------
1070
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001071- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1072
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001073- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1074
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001075- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1076 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001077
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001078- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1079 files.
1080
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001081Build
1082-----
1083
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001084- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001085 different root directory.
1086
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001087C API
1088-----
1089
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001090- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1091 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1092 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1093 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1094 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1095 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1096 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1097 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1098 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1099 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1100
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001101- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1102 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1103 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1104 from Python.
1105
1106
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001107New platforms
1108-------------
1109
1110None this time.
1111
1112Tests
1113-----
1114
1115- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1116 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1117
1118Windows
1119-------
1120
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001121- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1122
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001123- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1124 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1125 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1126 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1127 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1128 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1129 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1130 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1131 that's what it's for.
1132
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001133Mac
1134---
1135
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001136- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1137 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1138 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1139 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001140- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1141 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1142- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001143
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001144SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1145------------------------------------
1146
1147430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1148598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1149622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1150661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1151683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1152697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1153713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1154724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1155727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1156729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1157730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1158731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1159732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1160733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1161735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1162740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1163744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1164745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1165747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1166749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1167751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1168753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1169755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1170757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1171760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1172
1173
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001174What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1175================================
1176
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001177*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001178
1179Core and builtins
1180-----------------
1181
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001182- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1183 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1184
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001185- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1186 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1187 and cannot be strings).
1188
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001189- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1190 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1191 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1192 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1193
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001194- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1195 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1196 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1197 Python itself.
1198
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001199- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1200 the referenced object, if it has one.
1201
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001202- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1203 the thread started at
1204 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1205
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001206- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1207 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1208 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1209 placed on a list index.
1210
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001211- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1212 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1213 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1214 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1215
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001216- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1217 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1218 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1219 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1220 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1221 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1222 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1223
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001224- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1225 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1226 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1227 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1228 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1229
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001230- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1231 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001232
1233- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1234 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1235 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1236 #693195.)
1237
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001238- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1239 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001240
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001241- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001242 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001243 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1244 interpreter executions, would fail.
1245
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001246- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001247 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001248 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001249
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001250Extension modules
1251-----------------
1252
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001253- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1254 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1255 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1256 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1257
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001258- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1259 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1260
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001261- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1262 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1263 and Greg Chapman.)
1264
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001265- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1266 recursively.
1267
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001268- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001269 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1270 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1271 leaks.
1272
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001273- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1274
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001275- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1276 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1277 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1278 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1279 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1280 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1281 #705836.
1282
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001283- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001284 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1285
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001286- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1287 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1288 See SF bug #692416.
1289
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001290- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1291 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1292
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001293- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1294 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1295 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001296
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001297- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001298 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1299 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1300
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001301- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1302 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1303 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1304 timeouts to work properly.
1305
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001306Library
1307-------
1308
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001309- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1310 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1311 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1312 future release.
1313
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001314- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1315 for querying platform dependent features.
1316
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001317- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001318
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001319- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1320 pickle protocol versions.
1321
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001322- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1323 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1324 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1325
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001326- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1327
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001328- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1329 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1330 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1331 modules.
1332
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001333- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1334 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1335 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1336
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001337- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1338 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1339
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001340- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1341 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1342 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1343
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001344- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001345 MS Office extensions.
1346
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001347- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1348 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1349
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001350- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1351 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1352
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001353- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1354 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1355 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1356 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1357 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1358 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1359
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001360- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1361 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1362 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001363
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001364- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1365 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1366 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1367
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001368- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1369
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001370- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1371 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1372 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1373
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001374Tools/Demos
1375-----------
1376
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001377- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1378 See the module docstring for details.
1379
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001380Build
1381-----
1382
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001383- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1384 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001385
1386C API
1387-----
1388
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001389- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1390
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001391- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1392 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1393 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1394
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001395- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1396 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001397
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001398 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1399 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1400 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001401
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001402- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001403 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1404
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001405- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1406 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1407 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001408
1409New platforms
1410-------------
1411
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001412None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001413
1414Tests
1415-----
1416
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001417- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1418 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001419
1420Windows
1421-------
1422
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001423- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1424 function.
1425
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001426- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1427 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001428
1429Mac
1430---
1431
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001432- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1433 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001434
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001435- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1436 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001437
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001438- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1439 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1440 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001441
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001442- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001443 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1444 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001445
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001446- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1447 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001448
1449
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001450What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1451=================================
1452
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001453*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001454
1455Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001456-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001457
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001458- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1459 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1460 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1461
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001462- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1463 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1464 (SF patch #664376.)
1465
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001466- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1467 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1468 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1469 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1470 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1471 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001472 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001473
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001474- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1475 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1476 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1477 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001478 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001479
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001480- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1481 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1482 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1483 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1484 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1485 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1486 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1487 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1488 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1489 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1490 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1491
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001492- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1493 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1494 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1495 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1496 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1497 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1498
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001499- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1500 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1501
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001502- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1503 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1504 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1505 case.)
1506
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001507- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1508 passed as unicode strings.
1509
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001510- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1511 See SF bug #683467.
1512
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001513- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1514 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1515
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001516- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1517
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001518- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1519
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001520- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1521 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1522 arguments.
1523
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001524- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1525 See SF bug #667147.
1526
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001527- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001528 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001529 See SF bug #676155.
1530
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001531- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001532 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001533 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1534 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1535 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1536 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1537 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1538 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001539
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001540Extension modules
1541-----------------
1542
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001543- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1544 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1545 tp_as_number pointer.
1546
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001547- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1548 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1549 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1550 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1551 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1552
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001553- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1554
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001555- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1556
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001557- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001558 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001559 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1560 patch #678531.)
1561
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001562- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1563 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1564
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001565- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1566 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1567
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001568- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1569
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001570- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1571 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1572 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1573
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001574- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1575
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001576- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1577 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1578
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001579- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001580
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001581- datetime changes:
1582
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001583 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1584
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001585 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1586 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1587 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1588 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1589 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1590 now.
1591
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001592 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001593 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1594 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001595
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001596 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001597 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001598 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1599 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1600 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1601 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001602
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001603 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1604 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1605 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001606 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1607
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001608 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1609 by a later example coded by Guido.
1610
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001611 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001612 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1613 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1614 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001615 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1616 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1617
1618 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1619 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1620 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1621 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1622 tzinfo subclass instance.
1623
1624 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1625 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1626 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1627 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1628 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1629 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1630 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1631 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001632
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001633 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1634 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1635 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1636 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1637 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001638 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1639
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001640 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001641
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001642 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1643 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1644 as a naive datetime object.
1645
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001646 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1647 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1648 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1649
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001650 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1651 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1652 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1653 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1654 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1655 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1656 comparison.
1657
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001658 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1659 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1660 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1661 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001662 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001663
1664 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001665
1666 and ::
1667
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001668 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1669
1670 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1671 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1672 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1673 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1674
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001675 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1676 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1677 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1678 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1679 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1680
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001681 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1682 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001683 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1684 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001685
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001686Library
1687-------
1688
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001689- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1690 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1691
1692- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1693 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1694 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1695 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1696 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1697 See PEP 307 for details.
1698
1699- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1700 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1701
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001702- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1703 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001704 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001705 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1706 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001707 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001708
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001709- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1710 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1711
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001712- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1713 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1714 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1715
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001716- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1717
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001718- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1719 exception.
1720
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001721- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1722 class.
1723
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001724- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1725 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1726 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1727
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001728- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1729 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1730
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001731- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001732 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1733 See SF bug #659228.
1734
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001735- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1736 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1737 See SF patch #651082.
1738
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001739- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001740
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001741- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1742 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1743
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001744- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001745 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001746
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001747- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1748 DOS paths from other platforms.
1749
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001750Tools/Demos
1751-----------
1752
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001753- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1754 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1755 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1756 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1757 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1758 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1759 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1760 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1761 example:
1762
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001763 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1764 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001765
1766 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1767
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001768
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001769Build
1770-----
1771
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001772- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1773 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1774 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001775 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1776
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001777 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1778
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001779- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1780 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1781 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1782 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1783 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1784 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1785 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1786 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1787 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1788
1789- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1790 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1791 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1792 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1793
1794- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1795 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1796
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001797C API
1798-----
1799
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001800- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1801 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001802
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001803- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1804 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1805 tp_as_number pointer.
1806
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001807- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1808 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1809 (SF #681367)
1810
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001811- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1812 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1813 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1814 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001815
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001816Tests
1817-----
1818
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001819- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001820 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1821 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1822 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1823 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1824 pydoc.)
1825
1826- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1827
1828- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001829
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001830Windows
1831-------
1832
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001833- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1834 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1835 time).
1836
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001837- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1838 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1839
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001840- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1841 release without strong cryptography.
1842
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001843- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001844 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001845
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001846- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1847 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1848
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001849Mac
1850---
1851
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001852- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1853 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001854
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001855- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1856 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1857 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001858
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001859- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1860 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001861
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001862- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1863 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1864 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1865 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001866
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001867- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001868 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1869 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1870 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001871
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001872
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001873What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001874=================================
1875
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001876*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001877
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001878Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001879--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001880
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001881- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1882
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001883- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1884 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001885 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001886 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001887 a different meaning than before.
1888
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001889- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001890 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001891 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001892
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001893- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001894 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001895 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001896
1897- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1898 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1899 and deallocation.
1900
1901- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1902 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1903
1904- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1905 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1906 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1907 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1908 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1909
1910- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1911 now detected by the garbage collector.
1912
1913- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1914 [SF bug 519621]
1915
1916- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1917 identifier.
1918
1919- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1920 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1921 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1922 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1923 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1924 [SF bug 563060]
1925
1926- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1927 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1928 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1929 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1930 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1931
1932- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1933 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1934 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1935
1936- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1937
1938- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1939 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1940 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1941 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1942 state of the slots would be lost.)
1943
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001944Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001945-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001946
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001947- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001948 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1949 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1950 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1951 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001952 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1953 Jython 2.1.
1954
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001955- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001956 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001957 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1958 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1959 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1960 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1961 these, see PEP 302.
1962
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001963- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1964 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1965 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1966
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001967- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1968 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1969 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1970
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001971- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1972 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1973 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1974
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001975- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1976 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1977 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1978 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1979 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1980 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1981 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1982 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1983 releases or implementations.
1984
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001985- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001986 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1987 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001988
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001989- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1990 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1991
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001992- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1993 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1994 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1995
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001996- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1997 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1998
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001999- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2000 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002001 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2002 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002003
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002004- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2005 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2006 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2007 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2008 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2009
2010 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2011 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2012 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2013 pattern.
2014
2015 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2016 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2017 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2018 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2019
2020 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2021 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2022 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2023 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2024 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2025 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2026
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002027- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2028 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2029 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2030 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2031 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2032 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2033 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2034 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002035
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002036- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2037 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2038 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2039 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2040 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002041 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2042 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2043 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2044 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2045 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2046 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2047 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002048
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002049- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2050 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2051
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002052- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2053 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2054 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2055 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2056 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2057 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2058 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2059 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2060 to Zack Weinberg!
2061
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002062- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2063 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2064 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2065 type. This has been fixed now.
2066
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002067- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2068 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2069 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2070
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002071- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2072 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2073 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2074 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2075 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2076 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2077 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2078 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002079 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002080
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002081- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2082 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2083 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002084
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002085- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2086 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2087 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2088 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2089 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2090 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2091 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2092 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002093 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002094 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2095 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2096
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002097- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2098 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2099 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2100 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2101 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2102 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2103 this.)
2104
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002105- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2106 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002107 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002108 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002109 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2110 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002111 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2112 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002113
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002114- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2115 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2116 currently running.
2117
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002118- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2119 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2120 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2121 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2122
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002123- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2124 as directory names.
2125
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002126- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2127 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2128
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002129- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2130 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2131
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002132- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002133 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2134 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002135
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002136- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2137 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2138 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2139 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2140 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2141
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002142- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2143 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2144 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2145 removed.
2146
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002147- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2148 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2149 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2150
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002151- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2152 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2153 to __debug__.
2154
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002155- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2156 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2157 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2158
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002159- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2160 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2161 deprecated now.
2162
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002163- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2164 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2165 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002166
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002167- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2168 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2169 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2170 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2171 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002172
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002173- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2174 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2175
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002176- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2177 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2178 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002179 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002180 is backward compatible.
2181
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002182- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2183 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2184 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2185 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2186 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2187
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002188- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2189 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2190 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2191 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2192 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2193 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002194
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002195- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2196 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2197
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002198- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2199 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2200
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002201- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2202 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2203 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2204 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2205 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2206
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002207- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2208 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2209 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2210
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002211- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002212 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2213
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002214- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2215 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2216 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002217
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002218- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2219 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2220
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002221- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2222 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2223 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2224
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002225- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2226
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002227Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002228-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002229
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002230- Added three operators to the operator module:
2231 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2232 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2233 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2234
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002235- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2236
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002237- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2238 archives.
2239
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002240- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2241 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2242 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2243
2244 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2245
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002246- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2247 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2248 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002249 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002250
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002251- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2252 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2253 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2254 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002255 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2256 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2257 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2258 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002259
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002260- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2261 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002262
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002263- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2264
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002265- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2266 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2267
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002268- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2269 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2270 supported.
2271
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002272- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2273
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002274- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2275 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002276
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002277- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2278 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2279
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002280- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2281
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002282- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2283 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2284
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002285- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2286 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2287 functions but callable type objects.
2288
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002289- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002290 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002291 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002292
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002293- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2294 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002295
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002296- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2297 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002298
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002299- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2300 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2301 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2302 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2303
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002304- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2305 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002306
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002307- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2308 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2309 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2310 and __imul__.
2311
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002312- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002313 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2314 is called.
2315
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002316- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2317 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2318 interpreter was compiled.
2319
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002320- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2321 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2322 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002323 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002324 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2325 1, not 2.
2326
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002327- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2328 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2329 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2330 limit.
2331
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002332- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2333 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2334 bug #623464.
2335
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002336- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2337 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2338 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2339 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2340
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002341Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002342-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002343
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002344- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2345
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002346- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2347 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2348 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2349 with Python 2.3a2.
2350
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002351- os.path exposes getctime.
2352
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002353- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002354 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002355 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002356 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002357 unit tests of floating point results.
2358
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002359- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2360 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2361 has been increased.
2362
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002363- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2364 executed.
2365
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002366- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2367 postinstallation script.
2368
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002369- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2370 test the current module.
2371
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002372- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002373 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2374 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2375 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2376 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2377
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002378- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002379 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002380 Ward's Optik package.
2381
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002382- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2383 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2384 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2385 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2386
2387- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2388 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002389 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002390
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002391- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2392 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2393 shelf are binary pickles.
2394
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002395- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2396 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2397
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002398- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2399 modules are iterators now.
2400
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002401- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2402 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2403 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2404 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2405 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2406 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002407
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002408- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2409 with their entity value.
2410
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002411- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2412
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002413- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2414 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002415
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002416- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2417 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002418 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002419
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002420- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2421 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2422 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2423 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2424 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2425 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2426 main():
2427
2428 import locale
2429 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2430
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002431- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2432 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2433
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002434- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2435 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2436 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2437 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2438 to the new standard.
2439
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002440- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2441 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2442 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2443 an extension to the database.
2444
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002445- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2446 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2447 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2448 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002449 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002450
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002451- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002452 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002453
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002454- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2455 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2456 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2457 bounded integers.
2458
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002459- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2460 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2461 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2462 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2463 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2464 in existence.
2465
2466 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2467 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2468 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2469 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2470 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2471 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2472
2473 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2474 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2475 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2476 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2477
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002478- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2479 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2480 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2481
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002482- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2483
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002484- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2485 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2486 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2487 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2488
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002489- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2490 argument.
2491
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002492- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2493 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2494 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2495 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2496 [SF patch 560794].
2497
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002498- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2499 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2500 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002501 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2502 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2503 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002504
2505- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2506 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002507
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002508- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2509 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2510 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2511 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002512
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002513- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2514 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2515 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2516 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2517 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2518
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002519- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002520
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002521- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2522
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002523- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2524 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2525 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2526 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2527 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2528 identical to None.
2529
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002530- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2531 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2532 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2533 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2534 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2535 results now.
2536
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002537- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2538 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2539
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002540- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2541 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2542 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2543 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2544 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2545 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2546 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2547 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2548
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002549- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2550
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002551- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2552 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2553
2554- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2555 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2556 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2557 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2558 and other systems.
2559
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002560- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2561 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2562 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2563 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 +00002564 work well with these.
2565
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002566- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2567
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002568- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002569 connections.
2570
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002571- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2572 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2573 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2574
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002575- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2576 sets
2577
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002578- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2579 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2580 name.
2581
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002582- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2583 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2584 passed in.
2585
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002586- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002587 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002588 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2589 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002590
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002591- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2592
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002593- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2594
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002595- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2596 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2597 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2598
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002599- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2600 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2601 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2602 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002603 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002604
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002605- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002606 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002607 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002608
2609- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2610 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2611 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2612
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002613- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002614 the value of its expression argument.
2615
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002616- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2617 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2618 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2619
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002620- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2621 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2622 skipstone browser was included.
2623
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002624- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2625 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2626
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002627Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002628-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002629
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002630- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2631 names in addition to accepting file names.
2632
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002633- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2634 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2635 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2636 still used and useful.)
2637
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002638- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2639 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2640 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2641 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002642
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002643- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2644 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2645 the generated binary.
2646
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002647Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002648-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002649
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002650- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2651
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002652- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2653 except in the hands of experts.
2654
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002655- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002656 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2657 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2658 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002659
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002660- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2661 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2662 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2663 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2664 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2665 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2666 builds.
2667
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002668- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2669 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2670 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2671 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2672 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2673 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2674 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2675 new type.
2676
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002677- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002678
2679 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2680 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2681 positive infinities.
2682
2683 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2684 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2685 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2686 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2687 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2688 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2689 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2690
2691 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2692
2693 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2694
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002695- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2696 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2697 size of the executable.
2698
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002699- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2700 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2701 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2702 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002703
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002704- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2705
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002706- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2707 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2708 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002709
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002710- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2711 well as Unix.
2712
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002713- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2714 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2715 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2716 modules in the README file for details.
2717
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002718C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002719-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002720
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002721- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2722 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002723 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002724 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002725 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002726
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002727- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2728 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2729 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2730 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2731 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2732 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002733 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002734 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2735 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2736 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2737 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2738 aligned.)
2739
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002740- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2741 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2742 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2743
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002744- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2745 level.
2746
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002747- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2748 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2749 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2750 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2751 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2752
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002753- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2754 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2755 code.
2756
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002757- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2758 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2759 adjusting for negative indices.
2760
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002761- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2762 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2763 object.
2764
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002765- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2766 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2767 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2768
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002769- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2770 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002771
2772- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2773
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002774- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2775 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2776 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2777 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2778
2779- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2780
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002781- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002782
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002783- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002784 without going through the buffer API.
2785
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002787
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002788- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2789 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2790 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2791 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2792
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002793- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2794 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2795
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002796- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002797 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2798
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002799New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002800-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002801
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002802- OpenVMS is now supported.
2803
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002804- AtheOS is now supported.
2805
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002806- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2807
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002808- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2809
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002810Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002811-----
2812
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002813- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2814 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2815 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002816
2817Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002818-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002819
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002820- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2821 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2822 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2823 bugs.
2824 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002825 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002826 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2827 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002828 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002829
2830- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002831 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002832
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002833- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2834 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2835
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002836- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2837 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002838 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002839 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2840
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002841- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2842 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2843 use files" uninstall option).
2844
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002845- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2846
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002847- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2848 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2849
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002850- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2851 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2852 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2853
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002854- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2855 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2856 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2857 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2858 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002859 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2860 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2861 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002862
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002863- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002864 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002865 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2866 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2867 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2868 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2869 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2870 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2871 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2872 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2873 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2874 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2875 work around.
2876
2877- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2878 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2879 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2880 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2881 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2882 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2883 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2884 specified with O_CREAT too).
2885
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002886Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002887----
2888
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002889- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002890
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002891- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2892 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2893 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2894
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002895- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2896 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2897 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2898
2899- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2900 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2901 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2902 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2903 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2904 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2905 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2906 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002907
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002908- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2909 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2910 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002911
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002912- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2913 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2914 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2915 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2916 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002917
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002918- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2919 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2920 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002922- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2923 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002924
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002925- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2926 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2927 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2928 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2929 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002930
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002931- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2932 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2933 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2934
2935- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2936 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2937 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002938
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002939- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2940 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2941 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2942 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002943 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002944
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002945- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2946 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002947
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002948- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2949 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002950
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002951- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002952 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002953 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2954 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002955
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002956
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002957What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002958===============================
2959
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002960*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2961
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002962Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002963--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002964
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002965- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2966 with a custom metaclass.
2967
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002970
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002971- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2972 are proxies.
2973
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002974Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002975-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002976
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002977- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2978 very short strings.
2979
2980- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2981 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2982 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2983 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2984 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2985
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002986Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002987-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002988
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002989- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2990 close or delete time).
2991
2992- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2993 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2994
2995- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2996
2997- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002998 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002999
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003000Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003002
3003Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003004-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003005
3006C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003008
3009New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003011
3012Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003013-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003014
3015Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003017
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003018- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3019
3020- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3021 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3022
3023- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3024 deleted at process exit time.
3025
3026- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3027 in backslash.
3028
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003029Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003030----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003031
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003032- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3033 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3034 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3035
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003036
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003037What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003038===========================
3039
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003040*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3041
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003042Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003043--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003044
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003045- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3046 been extensively updated. See
3047
3048 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3049
3050 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3051
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003052- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3053 deleted!
3054
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003055- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3056 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3057 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3058 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3059 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3060
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003061- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3062
3063 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3064 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3065
3066 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3067 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3068 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3069 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3070 supported anyway.
3071
3072 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3073 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3074
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003075- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3076 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3077 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3078 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3079 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003080
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003081- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3082 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3083 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3084
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003085Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003086-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003087
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003088- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3089 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3090 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3091 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3092 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3093 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003094 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3095 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3096 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3097 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003098
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003099- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3100 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3101 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3102
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003103Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003105
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003106- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3107
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003108Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003109-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003110
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003111- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3112 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3113 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3114 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3115 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3116 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3117
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003118- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3119
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003120- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3121
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003122- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3123
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003124- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3125 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3126 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3127
3128- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3129
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003130Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003132
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003133- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3134 off a search on Google.
3135
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003136Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003138
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003139- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3140 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3141 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3142 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3143 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3144 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3145 other platforms should do likewise.
3146
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003147- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3148 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3149 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3150
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003151C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003152-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003153
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003154- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3155 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3156 producing key-value pairs.
3157
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003158- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003159 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003160 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3161 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3162 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3163 previously went unchallenged.
3164
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003165New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003166-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003167
3168Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003169-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003170
3171Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003172-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003173
3174Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003175----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003176
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003177- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3178 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003179
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003180- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3181 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3182 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3183 home.
3184
3185
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003186What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003187===========================
3188
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3190
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003191Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003193
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003194- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3195 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003196
3197 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003198 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003199
3200 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3201 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003202 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003203 This needs to be documented.
3204
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003205- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3206 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3207
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003208- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3209 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3210 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3211
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003212- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3213 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3214
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003215- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3216 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3217 class forbids it).
3218
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003219- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3220 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3221 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3222
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003223- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3224
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003225Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003226-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003227
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003228- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3229 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003230 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003231
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003232- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3233 (like 1 + '').
3234
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003235Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003236-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003237
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003238- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3239 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3240 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3241 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003242 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003243 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3244
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003245- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3246 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3247 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3248 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3249
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003250- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3251 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003252 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3253 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3254 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003255
3256- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3257 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003258
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003259- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3260 bytes on its input.
3261
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003262Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003263-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003264
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003265- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003266 convenience function.
3267
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003268- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3269 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3270 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003271 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3272 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3273 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3274 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3275 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3276 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003277
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003278- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3279 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3280 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3281 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3282
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003283- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3284 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3285 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3286
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003287- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3288 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3289 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3290 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3291
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003292- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3293 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003294 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003295 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3296 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3297 new -l and -e options.
3298
3299- statcache is now deprecated.
3300
3301- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3302 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003304 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3305 time properly taken into account.
3306
3307- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3308 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3309 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3310 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3311
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003312Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003313-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003314
3315Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003317
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003318- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3319 is built with libdb3 if available.
3320
3321- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3322
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003323C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003324-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003325
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003326- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3327 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3328 PySequence_Size().
3329
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003330- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3331
3332- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3333 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3334 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3335
3336- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3337 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3338
3339- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3340 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3341
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003342New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003344
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003345- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3346 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3347
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003348- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3349 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3350
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003351- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3352
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003353Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003355
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003356- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3357 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3358
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003359Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003360-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003361
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003362Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003364
3365- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3366 removed completely in the next release.
3367
3368- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3369 OSX.
3370
3371- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3372 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3373
3374- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3375
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003376
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003377What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003378===========================
3379
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003380*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3381
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003382Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003383--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003384
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003385- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003386 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003387 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003388 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3389 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003390 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3391 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003392 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3393 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003394
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003395- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3396 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3397
3398- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3399 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3400
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003401Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003403
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003404- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3405 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3406 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3407 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3408 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3409 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3410 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3411 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3412
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003413- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3414 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3415 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3416 example).
3417
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003418- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003419 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003420 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003421 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003422
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003423- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3424 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3425 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003426 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003427
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003428- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3429 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3430 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3431 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3432 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3433 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3434
3435 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3436
3437 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3438
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003439Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003440-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003441
3442- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3443
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003444- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3445
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003446- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3447 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003448
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003449- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3450 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3451 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3452 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3453 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3454 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003455 attributes.
3456
3457- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3458 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3459 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003460
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003461- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3462 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3463 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003464
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003465- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3466 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3467 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003468 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3469 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3470
3471- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3472 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003473
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003474Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003475-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003476
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003477- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3478 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3479
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003480- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3481 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3482 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3483 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3484
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003485- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3486 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3487 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3488 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3489
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003490 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3491 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3492 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3493 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3494 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3495 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3496 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3497 without losing information).
3498
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003499- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003500 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3501 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3502 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3503 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3504 module).
3505
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003506 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003507 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3508 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3509 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3510 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003511
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003512- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003513 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3514 encoding.
3515
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003516- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3517 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3518
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003520 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3521
3522- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3523 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3524 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3525 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3526
3527- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3528
3529- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3530 ON, and OFF.
3531
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003532- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3533 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3534
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003535Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003537
3538- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3539 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3540 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003541
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003542- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3543 been added: -X and -E.
3544
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003545Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003547
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003548- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3549 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3550
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003551C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003553
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003554- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3555 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3556 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3557 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3558 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3559
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003560- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3561 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3562 as long) arguments.
3563
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003564- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3565 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3566 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3567 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3568 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3569 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3570
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003571- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3572 input.
3573
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003574New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003576
3577Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003579
3580Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003582
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003583- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3584 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3585 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3586
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003587- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3588 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3589 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003590 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003591
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3593 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3594 import signal
3595 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003596
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003597 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003598 while 1:
3599 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003600 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003601 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3602 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3603 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3604 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003605
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003606
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003607What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3608===========================
3609
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3611
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003612Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003614
3615- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3616 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3617 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3618
3619- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3620 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3621 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3622 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3623 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3624 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3625 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003626
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003627- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003628 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003629 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3630 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3631 associate a docstring with a property.
3632
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003633- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3634 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3635 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3636 other built-in object types.
3637
3638- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3639 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3640 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3641 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3642 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3643
3644- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3645 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3646
3647- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3648 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003649 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003650 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3651 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3652 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3653 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3654 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3655
3656- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3657 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3658 class.
3659
3660- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3661 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3662 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3663 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3664
3665- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3666 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3667 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3668 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3669
3670- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3671 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3672
3673- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3674 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3675 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3676 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3677 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003678 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003679 with the same value as s.
3680
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003681- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3682
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003683Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003685
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003686- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3687
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003688- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3689 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3690 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3691 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3692 objects.
3693
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003694- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3695 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003696 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3697 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3698
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003699- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3700 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3701 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3702
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003703Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003705
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003706- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3707 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3708 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3709 by the instances.
3710
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003711- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3712 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3713 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3714
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003715- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3716 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3717 before the entire comparison is complete.
3718
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003719- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3720 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3721 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3722
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003723- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3724 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3725 getwriter().
3726
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003727- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3728 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3729
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003730- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003731 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3732 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3733
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003734- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3735 iterable object.
3736
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003737- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3738 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003739
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003740- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3741 authentication.
3742
3743- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3744 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003745
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003746- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003747 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3748 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3749 a sample driver.)
3750
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003751Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003753
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003754- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3755 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3756 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3757 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3758 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3759 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3760 kernel has large file support.
3761
3762- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3763 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3764 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3765 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3766 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3767
3768- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3769 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3770 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3771
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003772C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003774
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003775- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3776 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3777
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003778New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003780
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003781- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3782 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3783
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003784Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003785-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003786
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003787- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3788 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3789 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3790 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3791 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3792
3793- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3794 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3795 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3796 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3797
3798- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3799 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3800
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003801Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003803
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003804- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003805 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3806 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003807
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003808
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003809What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3810===========================
3811
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3813
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003814Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003815----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003816
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003817- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3818 big to represent as a C double.
3819
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003820- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3821 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3822 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3823 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3824 restriction).
3825
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003826- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3827 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3828 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3829 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3830 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3831
3832 >>> dir([])
3833 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3834 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3835 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3836 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3837 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3838 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3839 'reverse', 'sort']
3840
3841 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3842
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003843- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003844 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3845 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3846 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3847 OverflowError exception.
3848
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003849- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003850 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003851 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3852 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3853 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3854 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3855 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003856 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003857 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3858 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3859
3860 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3861 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3862 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3863 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003864
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003865- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003866 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3867 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3868 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3869 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3870 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3871 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3872 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3873 once it is created.
3874
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003875- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3876 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3877 (key, value) pairs.
3878
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003879- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003880 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3881 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3882
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003883- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3884 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3885 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3886 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3887 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003888
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003889- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003890 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3891 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3892
3893 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3894
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003895- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003896 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3897
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003898Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003900
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003901- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003902 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3903 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003904
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003905- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3906 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3907 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3908 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3909 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3910 in this area anymore).
3911
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003912- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3913 threading.Timer.
3914
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003915- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3916 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3917
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003918- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003919 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3920
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003921- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003922 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3923 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3924 converted to Python longs.
3925
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003926- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003927 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3928
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003929- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3930 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3931 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3932
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003933Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003935
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003936- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3937 division operators as per PEP 238.
3938
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003939Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003941
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003942- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3943 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3944 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3945 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3946
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003947C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003948-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003949
3950- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003951
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003952- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3953 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003954 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003955
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003956 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3957 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003958 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003959 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003960
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003961- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003962 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3963 module:
3964
3965 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003966
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003967 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3968 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003969
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003970 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3971 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003972
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003973 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3974
3975 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3976
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003977- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003978 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3979 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3980 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003981
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003982New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003983-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003984
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003985- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3986 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3987 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3988 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3989 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003990
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003991Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003993
3994Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003995-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003996
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003997- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3998 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3999 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4000 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004001 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4002 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4003 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4004 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4005 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004006
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004007- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004008 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4009
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004010
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004011What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4012===========================
4013
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4015
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004016Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004018
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004019- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4020 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4021
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004022- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4023 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4024 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004025
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004026- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4027 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4028 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4029 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004030
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004031- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4032
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004033- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004034
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004035Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004036-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004037
4038- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004039 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004040 the module docstring for details.
4041
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004042Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004043-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004044
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004045- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004046 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4047 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4048 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004049
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004050- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4051 Nick Mathewson.
4052
4053Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004054----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004055
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004056- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4057 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4058 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4059 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4060 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4061 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4062 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4063 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4064
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004065- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4066 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4067 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4068 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4069
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004070- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4071 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4072 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4073 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4074 come a long way).
4075
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004076- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4077 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4078 write filters for these warnings).
4079
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004080- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4081 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4082 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4083 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4084 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4085
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004086- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4087 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4088 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4089 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4090 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4091 older distribution.
4092
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004095
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004096- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4097 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004098 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004099
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004100- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4101 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4102 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4103
4104- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4105
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004106- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4107
4108- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4109
4110- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4111
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004112- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004113
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004114- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4115
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004116New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004117-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004118
4119C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004121
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004122- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4123 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4124 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4125 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4126 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4127 against buffer overruns.
4128
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004129- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004130 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4131 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004132 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4133 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4134 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4135
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004136- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4137 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4138 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4139 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4140 deprecated.
4141
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004142Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004144
4145- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4146 relevant is found.
4147
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004148
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004149What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004150===========================
4151
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004152*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4153
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004154Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004156
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004157- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4158 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4159 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4160 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4161 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4162 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4163 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4164 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004165 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004166 repaired.
4167
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004168- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004169 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004170 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4171 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4172 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4173 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4174 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4175 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4176 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4177 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4178
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004179- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4180 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4181 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4182 leading BMO character).
4183
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004184- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4185 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4186 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4187
4188 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4189 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4190 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004191
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004192 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4193 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4194 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4195 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4196 for various simple to use conversions.
4197
4198 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4199 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4200
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4202 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4203 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4204 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4205 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4206 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4207 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4208 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4209 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4210 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4211 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4212 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4213 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4214 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4215 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004216
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004217- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4218 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4219 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004220 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004221 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004222
4223 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004224 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4225 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4226 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4227 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4228 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004229 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4230 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004231
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004232 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4233 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4234 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004235 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004236
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004237- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4238 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4239 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4240 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4241 floating arithmetic,
4242
4243 x = 9007199254740992.0
4244 print long(x)
4245
4246 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4247 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4248 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4249 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4250 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4251 functions are of good quality).
4252
4253 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4254 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4255 algorithms to break.
4256
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004257- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4258 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4259 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4260 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4261 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4262 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4263 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4264 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4265 order.
4266
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004267- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4268 operation along the most common code paths.
4269
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004270- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4271 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4272
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004273- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4274 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4275 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4276 {}.update(UserDict())
4277
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004278- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4279 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4280 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4281 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4282 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4283 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4284 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4285 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4286
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004287- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004288 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004290 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004291 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4292 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004293 join() method of strings
4294 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004295 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4296 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004298 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004299
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004300- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4301 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4302
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004303- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4304 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4305
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004306- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4307 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4308 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4309 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4310
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004311- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4312 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004313 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004314 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4315 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004316
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004317- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4318
4319
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004320Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004321-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004322
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004323- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004324 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004325 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4326 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4327
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004328- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4329 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4330
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004331- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4332 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4333 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4334 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4335
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004336- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4337 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4338 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4339
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004340- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4341
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004342- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4343
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004344- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4345 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4346 that are still imported into string.py).
4347
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004348- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4349
4350- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4351 Now it does.
4352
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004353- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4354
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004355- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4356 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4357 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4358 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4359 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004360 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4361 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004362
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004363- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4364 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4365 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4366 'help(object)'.
4367
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004368Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004369-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004370
4371- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004372 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004373 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4374 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4375
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004376- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004377 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4378 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004379
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004380C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004381-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004382
4383- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4384 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385
4386----
4387
4388**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**