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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
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000015- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
16 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
17 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
18 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
19 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
20 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
21 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
22 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
23 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
24 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
25 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
26 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
27 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
28 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000029
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000030- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
31 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
32 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
33 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
34 This has been repaired.
35
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000036- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
37
38- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
39
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000040- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
41 over a sequence.
42
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000043- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
44
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000045- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
46 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
47 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
48 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
49 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
50 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
51 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
52 records with equal keys is unchanged).
53
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000054- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
55 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000056
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000057- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
58 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
59 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
60
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000061- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
62 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
63 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
64 freelist.
65
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000066- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
67 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
68
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +000069- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
70 number.
71
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +000072- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
73 a TypeError exception.
74
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +000075- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
76 820195.
77
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +000078- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
79 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
80 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
81
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000082Extension modules
83-----------------
84
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +000085- os.getsid was added.
86
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +000087- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
88 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
89 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
90
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +000091- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
92
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +000093- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
94
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +000095- readline.clear_history was added.
96
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +000097- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
98
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +000099- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
100
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000101- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
102
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000103- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
104
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000105- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
106
107- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
108
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000109- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
110
111- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
112
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000113- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
114 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
115 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
116
117- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
118 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
119 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
120 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
121 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
122 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
123 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
124
125- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
126 iterators from a single iterable.
127
128- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
129 of raising a TypeError exception.
130
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000131Library
132-------
133
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000134- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
135
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000136- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
137
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000138- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
139
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000140- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
141 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
142
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000143- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
144
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000145- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
146 a string).
147
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000148- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
149
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000150- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
151
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000152- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
153
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000154- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
155
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000156- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
157 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
158 list of fieldnames.
159
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000160- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
161 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
162
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000163- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
164
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000165- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
166 empty lists.
167
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000168- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
169 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
170 and shelves.
171
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000172- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
173 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
174
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000175- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000176 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
177 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000178
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000179- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
180 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000181 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000182
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000183- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000184 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
185 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
186
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000187- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
188 and removed in Py2.4.
189
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000190- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
191
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000192Tools/Demos
193-----------
194
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000195- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
196
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000197- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
198 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
199 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
200 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
201
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000202- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
203
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000204- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
205 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
206 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
207 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
208 now.
209
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000210- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
211 in effect
212
213- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
214 C-c C-h
215
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000216- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
217 -d option was given.
218
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000219Build
220-----
221
222C API
223-----
224
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000225- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
226 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
227
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000228- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
229 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
230 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
231 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
232
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000233New platforms
234-------------
235
236Tests
237-----
238
239Windows
240-------
241
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000242- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
243 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
244 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
245
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000246Mac
247----
248
249
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000250What's New in Python 2.3 final?
251===============================
252
253*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
254
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000255IDLE
256----
257
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000258- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
259 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
260 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
261 context-menu actions.
262
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000263- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
264 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
265 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
266 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
267 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
268 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
269 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
270 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
271 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
272
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000273
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000274What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
275=============================================
276
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000277*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000278
279Core and builtins
280-----------------
281
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000282- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000283 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000284 comment at the end are still unsupported.
285
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000286Extension modules
287-----------------
288
289- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
290 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
291 than once. This has been fixed.
292
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000293- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
294 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
295 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
296 call.
297
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000298- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
299
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000300Library
301-------
302
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000303- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
304 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
305
306- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
307 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
308 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
309 restored.
310
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000311IDLE
312----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000313
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000314- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000315
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000316Build
317-----
318
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000319- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
320 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
321
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000322C API
323-----
324
325Windows
326-------
327
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000328- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
329 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
330
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000331- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
332
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000333Mac
334---
335
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000336- Various fixes to pimp.
337
338- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
339
340- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
341 more problems than it solves.
342
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000343
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000344What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
345=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000346
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000347*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
348
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000349Core and builtins
350-----------------
351
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000352- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
353 by sys.setcheckinterval().
354
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000355- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
356 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000357 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000358
359- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
360 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
361 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000362 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000363
364- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
365 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000366
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000367- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
368 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
369 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
370
371- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000372 770247.
373
374- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000375
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000376Extension modules
377-----------------
378
379- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
380 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
381
382- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
383
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000384- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
385
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000386- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
387 contained within the _strptime module.
388
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000389- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
390 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
391
392- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000393 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
394
395- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
396 the find_class attribute, if present.
397
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000398- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000399
400 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
401 (SF bug 763298).
402
403 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000404 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
405 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
406 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000407
408 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
409
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000410Library
411-------
412
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000413- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
414
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000415- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
416 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
417 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
418 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
419 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
420 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
421 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
422 or Tester().
423
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000424- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
425 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
426 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
427 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
428 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
429 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
430 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
431 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
432 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000433
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000434 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000435
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000436- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
437 weren't before was an oversight.
438
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000439- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
440 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
441
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000442- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
443 when there are no lines.
444
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000445- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
446 which could occur with Tk 8.4
447
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000448- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
449 to child processes.
450
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000451- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
452
453- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
454
455- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
456 xmlrpclib.
457
458- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
459 responses.
460
461- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
462 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
463
464- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
465 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
466 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
467
468- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
469 used as patterns.
470
471- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
472 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
473 than Tk 8.3.
474
475- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
476
477- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000478
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000479Tools/Demos
480-----------
481
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000482- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
483
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000484- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
485
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000486- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000487
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000488Build
489-----
490
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000491- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
492
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000493- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
494
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000495- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
496 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000497
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000498- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
499 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
500 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000501
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000502C API
503-----
504
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000505- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
506 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
507
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000508Windows
509-------
510
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000511- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
512 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
513 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
514 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
515 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
516 Python exception ::
517
518 thread.error: can't start new thread
519
520 is raised now.
521
522- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
523 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
524 instead of from DLL teardown.
525
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000526Mac
527---
528
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000529- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000530 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000531 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
532 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
533 the executable in the bundle.
534
535- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000536
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000537- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
538
539- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
540 on Panther.
541
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000542What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
543================================
544
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000545*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000546
547Core and builtins
548-----------------
549
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000550- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
551 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
552 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
553 with the -i option.
554
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000555- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
556 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
557
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000558- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
559 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
560
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000561- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
562 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
563 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
564 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
565 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
566 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
567 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
568 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
569 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
570 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
571 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
572 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
573 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000574
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000575- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
576 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
577 embedded in a lambda expression.
578
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000579- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
580 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
581 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
582 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
583 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
584
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000585- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
586 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
587 matches the restriction on classic classes.
588
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000589- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
590 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
591
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000592- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
593 It's writable again.
594
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000595- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
596 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
597 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000598 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000599
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000600- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
601 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
602 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
603
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000604Extension modules
605-----------------
606
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000607- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
608 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
609
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000610- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
611 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
612 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
613 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
614
615- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
616 collection.
617
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000618- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
619 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
620 unique within a single program run.
621
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000622- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
623 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
624
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000625- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
626 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
627
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000628- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
629 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000630
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000631- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
632
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000633- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
634 Fixes SF bug #730685.
635
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000636- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
637 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
638 for many BSD-derived systems.
639
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000640
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000641Library
642-------
643
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000644- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
645 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
646 primary ones:
647
648 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
649 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
650 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
651
652 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
653 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
654 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
655 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
656 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
657 framework features (which doctest lacks).
658
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000659- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
660 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
661 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
662 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
663 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
664 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
665 argument.
666
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000667- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
668 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
669 in the archive.
670
671- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
672 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
673
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000674- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
675 569574).
676
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000677- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
678 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
679 no more.
680
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000681- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
682 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
683 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
684 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
685 code coverage.
686
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000687- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
688 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
689 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000690 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
691 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000692
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000693- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
694 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
695 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000696 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000697
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000698- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
699
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000700- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
701 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
702 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
703 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
704
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000705- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
706 handling.
707
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000708- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
709 __doc__ of data descriptors.
710
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000711- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
712 in socket.py.
713
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000714- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
715
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000716- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
717 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
718 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
719 opener with proxy support.
720
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000721- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
722
723- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
724
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000725Tools/Demos
726-----------
727
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000728- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
729
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000730- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
731
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000732- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
733 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000734
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000735- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
736 files.
737
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000738Build
739-----
740
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000741- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000742 different root directory.
743
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000744C API
745-----
746
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000747- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
748 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
749 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
750 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
751 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
752 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
753 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
754 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
755 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
756 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
757
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000758- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
759 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
760 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
761 from Python.
762
763
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000764New platforms
765-------------
766
767None this time.
768
769Tests
770-----
771
772- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
773 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
774
775Windows
776-------
777
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000778- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
779
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000780- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
781 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
782 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
783 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
784 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
785 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
786 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
787 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
788 that's what it's for.
789
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000790Mac
791---
792
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000793- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
794 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
795 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
796 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000797- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
798 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
799- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000800
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000801SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
802------------------------------------
803
804430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
805598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
806622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
807661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
808683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
809697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
810713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
811724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
812727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
813729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
814730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
815731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
816732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
817733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
818735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
819740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
820744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
821745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
822747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
823749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
824751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
825753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
826755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
827757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
828760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
829
830
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000831What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
832================================
833
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000834*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000835
836Core and builtins
837-----------------
838
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000839- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
840 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
841
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000842- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
843 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
844 and cannot be strings).
845
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000846- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
847 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
848 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
849 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
850
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000851- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
852 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
853 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
854 Python itself.
855
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000856- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
857 the referenced object, if it has one.
858
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000859- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
860 the thread started at
861 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
862
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000863- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
864 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
865 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
866 placed on a list index.
867
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000868- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
869 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
870 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
871 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
872
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000873- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
874 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
875 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
876 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
877 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
878 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
879 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
880
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000881- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
882 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
883 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
884 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
885 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
886
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000887- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
888 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000889
890- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
891 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
892 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
893 #693195.)
894
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000895- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
896 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000897
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000898- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000899 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000900 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
901 interpreter executions, would fail.
902
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000903- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000904 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000905 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000906
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000907Extension modules
908-----------------
909
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000910- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
911 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
912 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
913 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
914
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000915- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
916 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
917
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000918- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
919 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
920 and Greg Chapman.)
921
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000922- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
923 recursively.
924
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000925- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000926 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
927 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
928 leaks.
929
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000930- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
931
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000932- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
933 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
934 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
935 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
936 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
937 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
938 #705836.
939
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000940- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000941 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
942
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000943- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
944 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
945 See SF bug #692416.
946
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000947- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
948 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
949
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000950- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
951 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
952 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000953
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000954- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000955 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
956 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
957
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000958- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
959 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
960 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
961 timeouts to work properly.
962
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000963Library
964-------
965
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000966- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
967 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
968 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
969 future release.
970
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000971- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
972 for querying platform dependent features.
973
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000974- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000975
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000976- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
977 pickle protocol versions.
978
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000979- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
980 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
981 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
982
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000983- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
984
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000985- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
986 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
987 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
988 modules.
989
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000990- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
991 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
992 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
993
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000994- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
995 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
996
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000997- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
998 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
999 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1000
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001001- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001002 MS Office extensions.
1003
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001004- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1005 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1006
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001007- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1008 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1009
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001010- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1011 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1012 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1013 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1014 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1015 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1016
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001017- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1018 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1019 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001020
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001021- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1022 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1023 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1024
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001025- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1026
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001027- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1028 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1029 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1030
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001031Tools/Demos
1032-----------
1033
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001034- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1035 See the module docstring for details.
1036
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001037Build
1038-----
1039
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001040- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1041 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001042
1043C API
1044-----
1045
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001046- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1047
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001048- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1049 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1050 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1051
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001052- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1053 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001054
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001055 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1056 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1057 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001058
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001059- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001060 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1061
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001062- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1063 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1064 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001065
1066New platforms
1067-------------
1068
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001069None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001070
1071Tests
1072-----
1073
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001074- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1075 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001076
1077Windows
1078-------
1079
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001080- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1081 function.
1082
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001083- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1084 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001085
1086Mac
1087---
1088
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001089- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1090 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001091
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001092- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1093 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001094
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001095- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1096 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1097 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001098
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001099- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001100 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1101 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001102
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001103- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1104 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001105
1106
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001107What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1108=================================
1109
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001110*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001111
1112Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001113-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001114
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001115- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1116 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1117 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1118
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001119- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1120 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1121 (SF patch #664376.)
1122
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001123- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1124 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1125 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1126 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1127 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1128 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001129 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001130
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001131- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1132 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1133 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1134 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001135 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001136
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001137- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1138 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1139 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1140 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1141 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1142 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1143 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1144 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1145 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1146 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1147 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1148
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001149- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1150 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1151 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1152 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1153 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1154 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1155
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001156- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1157 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1158
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001159- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1160 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1161 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1162 case.)
1163
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001164- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1165 passed as unicode strings.
1166
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001167- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1168 See SF bug #683467.
1169
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001170- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1171 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1172
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001173- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1174
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001175- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1176
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001177- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1178 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1179 arguments.
1180
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001181- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1182 See SF bug #667147.
1183
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001184- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001185 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001186 See SF bug #676155.
1187
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001188- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001189 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001190 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1191 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1192 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1193 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1194 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1195 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001196
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001197Extension modules
1198-----------------
1199
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001200- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1201 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1202 tp_as_number pointer.
1203
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001204- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1205 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1206 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1207 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1208 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1209
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001210- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1211
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001212- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1213
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001214- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001215 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001216 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1217 patch #678531.)
1218
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001219- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1220 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1221
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001222- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1223 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1224
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001225- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1226
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001227- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1228 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1229 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1230
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001231- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1232
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001233- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1234 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1235
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001236- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001237
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001238- datetime changes:
1239
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001240 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1241
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001242 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1243 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1244 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1245 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1246 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1247 now.
1248
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001249 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001250 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1251 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001252
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001253 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001254 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001255 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1256 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1257 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1258 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001259
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001260 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1261 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1262 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001263 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1264
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001265 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1266 by a later example coded by Guido.
1267
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001268 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001269 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1270 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1271 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001272 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1273 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1274
1275 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1276 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1277 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1278 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1279 tzinfo subclass instance.
1280
1281 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1282 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1283 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1284 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1285 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1286 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1287 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1288 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001289
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001290 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1291 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1292 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1293 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1294 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001295 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1296
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001297 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001298
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001299 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1300 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1301 as a naive datetime object.
1302
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001303 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1304 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1305 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1306
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001307 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1308 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1309 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1310 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1311 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1312 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1313 comparison.
1314
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001315 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1316 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1317 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1318 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001319 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001320
1321 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001322
1323 and ::
1324
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001325 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1326
1327 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1328 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1329 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1330 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1331
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001332 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1333 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1334 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1335 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1336 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1337
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001338 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1339 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001340 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1341 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001342
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001343Library
1344-------
1345
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001346- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1347 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1348
1349- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1350 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1351 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1352 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1353 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1354 See PEP 307 for details.
1355
1356- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1357 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1358
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001359- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1360 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001361 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001362 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1363 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001364 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001365
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001366- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1367 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1368
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001369- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1370 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1371 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1372
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001373- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1374
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001375- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1376 exception.
1377
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001378- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1379 class.
1380
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001381- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1382 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1383 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1384
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001385- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1386 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1387
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001388- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001389 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1390 See SF bug #659228.
1391
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001392- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1393 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1394 See SF patch #651082.
1395
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001396- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001397
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001398- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1399 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1400
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001401- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001402 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001403
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001404- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1405 DOS paths from other platforms.
1406
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001407Tools/Demos
1408-----------
1409
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001410- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1411 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1412 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1413 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1414 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1415 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1416 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1417 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1418 example:
1419
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001420 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1421 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001422
1423 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1424
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001425
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001426Build
1427-----
1428
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001429- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1430 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1431 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001432 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1433
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001434 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1435
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001436- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1437 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1438 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1439 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1440 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1441 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1442 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1443 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1444 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1445
1446- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1447 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1448 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1449 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1450
1451- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1452 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1453
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001454C API
1455-----
1456
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001457- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1458 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001459
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001460- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1461 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1462 tp_as_number pointer.
1463
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001464- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1465 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1466 (SF #681367)
1467
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001468- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1469 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1470 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1471 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001472
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001473Tests
1474-----
1475
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001476- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001477 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1478 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1479 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1480 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1481 pydoc.)
1482
1483- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1484
1485- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001486
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001487Windows
1488-------
1489
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001490- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1491 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1492 time).
1493
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001494- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1495 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1496
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001497- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1498 release without strong cryptography.
1499
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001500- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001501 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001502
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001503- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1504 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1505
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001506Mac
1507---
1508
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001509- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1510 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001511
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001512- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1513 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1514 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001515
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001516- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1517 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001518
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001519- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1520 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1521 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1522 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001523
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001524- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001525 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1526 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1527 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001528
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001529
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001530What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001531=================================
1532
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001533*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001534
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001535Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001536--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001537
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001538- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1539
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001540- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1541 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001542 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001543 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001544 a different meaning than before.
1545
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001546- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001547 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001548 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001549
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001550- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001551 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001552 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001553
1554- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1555 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1556 and deallocation.
1557
1558- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1559 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1560
1561- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1562 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1563 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1564 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1565 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1566
1567- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1568 now detected by the garbage collector.
1569
1570- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1571 [SF bug 519621]
1572
1573- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1574 identifier.
1575
1576- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1577 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1578 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1579 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1580 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1581 [SF bug 563060]
1582
1583- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1584 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1585 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1586 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1587 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1588
1589- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1590 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1591 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1592
1593- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1594
1595- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1596 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1597 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1598 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1599 state of the slots would be lost.)
1600
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001601Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001602-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001603
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001604- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001605 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1606 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1607 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1608 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001609 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1610 Jython 2.1.
1611
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001612- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001613 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001614 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1615 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1616 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1617 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1618 these, see PEP 302.
1619
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001620- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1621 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1622 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1623
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001624- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1625 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1626 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1627
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001628- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1629 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1630 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1631
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001632- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1633 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1634 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1635 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1636 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1637 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1638 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1639 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1640 releases or implementations.
1641
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001642- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001643 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1644 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001645
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001646- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1647 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1648
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001649- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1650 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1651 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1652
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001653- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1654 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1655
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001656- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1657 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001658 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1659 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001660
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001661- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1662 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1663 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1664 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1665 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1666
1667 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1668 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1669 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1670 pattern.
1671
1672 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1673 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1674 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1675 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1676
1677 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1678 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1679 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1680 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1681 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1682 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1683
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001684- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1685 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1686 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1687 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1688 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1689 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1690 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1691 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001692
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001693- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1694 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1695 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1696 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1697 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001698 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1699 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1700 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1701 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1702 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1703 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1704 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001705
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001706- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1707 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1708
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001709- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1710 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1711 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1712 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1713 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1714 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1715 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1716 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1717 to Zack Weinberg!
1718
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001719- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1720 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1721 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1722 type. This has been fixed now.
1723
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001724- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1725 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1726 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1727
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001728- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1729 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1730 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1731 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1732 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1733 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1734 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1735 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001736 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001737
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001738- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1739 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1740 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001741
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001742- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1743 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1744 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1745 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1746 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1747 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1748 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1749 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001750 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001751 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1752 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1753
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001754- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1755 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1756 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1757 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1758 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1759 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1760 this.)
1761
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001762- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1763 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001764 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001765 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001766 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1767 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001768 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1769 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001770
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001771- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1772 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1773 currently running.
1774
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001775- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1776 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1777 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1778 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1779
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001780- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1781 as directory names.
1782
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001783- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1784 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1785
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001786- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1787 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1788
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001789- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001790 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1791 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001792
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001793- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1794 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1795 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1796 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1797 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1798
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001799- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1800 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1801 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1802 removed.
1803
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001804- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1805 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1806 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1807
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001808- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1809 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1810 to __debug__.
1811
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001812- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1813 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1814 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1815
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001816- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1817 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1818 deprecated now.
1819
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001820- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1821 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1822 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001823
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001824- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1825 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1826 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1827 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1828 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001829
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001830- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1831 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1832
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001833- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1834 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1835 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001836 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001837 is backward compatible.
1838
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001839- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1840 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1841 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1842 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1843 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1844
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001845- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1846 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1847 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1848 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1849 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1850 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001851
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001852- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1853 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1854
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001855- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1856 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1857
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001858- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1859 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1860 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1861 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1862 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1863
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001864- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1865 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1866 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1867
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001868- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001869 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1870
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001871- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1872 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1873 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001874
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001875- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1876 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1877
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001878- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1879 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1880 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1881
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001882- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1883
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001884Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001885-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001886
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001887- Added three operators to the operator module:
1888 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1889 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1890 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1891
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001892- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1893
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001894- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1895 archives.
1896
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001897- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1898 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1899 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1900
1901 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1902
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001903- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1904 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1905 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001906 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001907
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001908- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1909 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1910 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1911 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001912 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1913 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1914 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1915 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001916
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001917- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1918 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001919
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001920- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1921
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001922- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1923 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1924
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001925- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1926 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1927 supported.
1928
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001929- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1930
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001931- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1932 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001933
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001934- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1935 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1936
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001937- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1938
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001939- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1940 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1941
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001942- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1943 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1944 functions but callable type objects.
1945
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001946- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001947 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001948 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001949
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001950- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1951 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001952
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001953- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1954 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001955
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001956- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1957 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1958 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1959 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1960
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001961- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1962 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001963
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001964- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1965 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1966 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1967 and __imul__.
1968
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001969- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001970 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1971 is called.
1972
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001973- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1974 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1975 interpreter was compiled.
1976
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001977- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1978 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1979 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001980 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001981 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1982 1, not 2.
1983
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001984- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1985 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1986 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1987 limit.
1988
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001989- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1990 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1991 bug #623464.
1992
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001993- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1994 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1995 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1996 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1997
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001998Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001999-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002000
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002001- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2002
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002003- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2004 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2005 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2006 with Python 2.3a2.
2007
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002008- os.path exposes getctime.
2009
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002010- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002011 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002012 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002013 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002014 unit tests of floating point results.
2015
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002016- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2017 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2018 has been increased.
2019
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002020- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2021 executed.
2022
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002023- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2024 postinstallation script.
2025
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002026- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2027 test the current module.
2028
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002029- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002030 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2031 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2032 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2033 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2034
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002035- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002036 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002037 Ward's Optik package.
2038
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002039- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2040 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2041 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2042 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2043
2044- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2045 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002046 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002047
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002048- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2049 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2050 shelf are binary pickles.
2051
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002052- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2053 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2054
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002055- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2056 modules are iterators now.
2057
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002058- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2059 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2060 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2061 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2062 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2063 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002064
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002065- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2066 with their entity value.
2067
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002068- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2069
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002070- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2071 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002072
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002073- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2074 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002075 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002076
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002077- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2078 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2079 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2080 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2081 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2082 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2083 main():
2084
2085 import locale
2086 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2087
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002088- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2089 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2090
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002091- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2092 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2093 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2094 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2095 to the new standard.
2096
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002097- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2098 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2099 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2100 an extension to the database.
2101
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002102- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2103 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2104 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2105 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002106 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002107
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002108- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002109 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002110
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002111- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2112 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2113 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2114 bounded integers.
2115
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002116- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2117 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2118 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2119 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2120 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2121 in existence.
2122
2123 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2124 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2125 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2126 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2127 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2128 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2129
2130 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2131 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2132 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2133 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2134
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002135- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2136 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2137 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2138
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002139- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2140
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002141- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2142 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2143 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2144 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2145
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002146- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2147 argument.
2148
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002149- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2150 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2151 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2152 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2153 [SF patch 560794].
2154
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002155- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2156 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2157 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002158 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2159 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2160 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002161
2162- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2163 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002164
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002165- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2166 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2167 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2168 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002169
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002170- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2171 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2172 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2173 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2174 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2175
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002176- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002177
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002178- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2179
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002180- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2181 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2182 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2183 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2184 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2185 identical to None.
2186
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002187- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2188 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2189 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2190 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2191 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2192 results now.
2193
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002194- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2195 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2196
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002197- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2198 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2199 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2200 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2201 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2202 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2203 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2204 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2205
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002206- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2207
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002208- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2209 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2210
2211- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2212 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2213 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2214 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2215 and other systems.
2216
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002217- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2218 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2219 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2220 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 +00002221 work well with these.
2222
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002223- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2224
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002225- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002226 connections.
2227
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002228- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2229 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2230 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2231
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002232- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2233 sets
2234
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002235- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2236 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2237 name.
2238
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002239- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2240 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2241 passed in.
2242
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002243- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002244 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002245 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2246 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002247
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002248- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2249
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002250- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2251
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002252- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2253 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2254 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2255
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002256- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2257 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2258 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2259 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002260 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002261
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002262- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002263 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002264 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002265
2266- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2267 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2268 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2269
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002270- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002271 the value of its expression argument.
2272
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002273- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2274 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2275 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2276
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002277- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2278 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2279 skipstone browser was included.
2280
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002281- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2282 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2283
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002284Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002285-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002286
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002287- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2288 names in addition to accepting file names.
2289
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002290- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2291 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2292 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2293 still used and useful.)
2294
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002295- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2296 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2297 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2298 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002299
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002300- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2301 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2302 the generated binary.
2303
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002304Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002305-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002306
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002307- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2308
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002309- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2310 except in the hands of experts.
2311
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002312- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002313 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2314 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2315 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002316
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002317- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2318 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2319 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2320 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2321 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2322 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2323 builds.
2324
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002325- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2326 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2327 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2328 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2329 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2330 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2331 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2332 new type.
2333
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002334- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002335
2336 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2337 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2338 positive infinities.
2339
2340 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2341 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2342 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2343 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2344 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2345 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2346 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2347
2348 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2349
2350 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2351
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002352- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2353 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2354 size of the executable.
2355
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002356- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2357 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2358 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2359 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002360
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002361- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2362
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002363- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2364 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2365 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002366
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002367- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2368 well as Unix.
2369
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002370- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2371 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2372 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2373 modules in the README file for details.
2374
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002375C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002377
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002378- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2379 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002380 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002381 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002382 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002383
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002384- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2385 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2386 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2387 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2388 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2389 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002390 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002391 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2392 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2393 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2394 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2395 aligned.)
2396
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002397- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2398 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2399 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2400
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002401- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2402 level.
2403
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002404- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2405 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2406 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2407 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2408 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2409
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002410- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2411 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2412 code.
2413
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002414- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2415 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2416 adjusting for negative indices.
2417
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002418- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2419 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2420 object.
2421
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002422- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2423 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2424 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2425
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002426- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2427 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002428
2429- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2430
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002431- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2432 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2433 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2434 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2435
2436- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2437
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002438- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002439
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002440- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002441 without going through the buffer API.
2442
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002443- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002444
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002445- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2446 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2447 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2448 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2449
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002450- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2451 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2452
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002453- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002454 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2455
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002456New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002457-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002458
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002459- OpenVMS is now supported.
2460
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002461- AtheOS is now supported.
2462
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002463- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2464
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002465- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2466
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002467Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002468-----
2469
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002470- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2471 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2472 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002473
2474Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002475-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002476
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002477- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2478 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2479 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2480 bugs.
2481 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002482 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002483 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2484 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002485 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002486
2487- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002488 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002489
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002490- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2491 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2492
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002493- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2494 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002495 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002496 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2497
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002498- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2499 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2500 use files" uninstall option).
2501
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002502- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2503
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002504- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2505 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2506
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002507- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2508 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2509 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2510
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002511- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2512 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2513 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2514 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2515 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002516 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2517 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2518 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002519
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002520- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002521 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002522 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2523 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2524 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2525 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2526 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2527 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2528 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2529 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2530 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2531 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2532 work around.
2533
2534- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2535 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2536 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2537 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2538 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2539 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2540 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2541 specified with O_CREAT too).
2542
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002543Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002544----
2545
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002546- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002547
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002548- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2549 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2550 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2551
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002552- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2553 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2554 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2555
2556- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2557 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2558 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2559 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2560 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2561 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2562 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2563 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002564
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002565- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2566 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2567 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002568
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002569- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2570 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2571 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2572 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2573 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002574
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002575- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2576 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2577 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002578
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002579- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2580 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002581
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002582- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2583 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2584 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2585 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2586 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002587
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002588- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2589 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2590 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2591
2592- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2593 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2594 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002595
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002596- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2597 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2598 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2599 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002600 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002601
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002602- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2603 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002604
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002605- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2606 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002607
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002608- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002609 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002610 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2611 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002612
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002613
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002614What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002615===============================
2616
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002617*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2618
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002619Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002620--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002621
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002622- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2623 with a custom metaclass.
2624
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002625Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002626-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002627
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002628- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2629 are proxies.
2630
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002631Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002633
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002634- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2635 very short strings.
2636
2637- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2638 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2639 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2640 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2641 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2642
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002643Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002644-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002645
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002646- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2647 close or delete time).
2648
2649- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2650 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2651
2652- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2653
2654- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002655 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002656
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002657Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002658-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002659
2660Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002661-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002662
2663C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002664-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002665
2666New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002668
2669Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002670-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002671
2672Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002673-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002674
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002675- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2676
2677- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2678 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2679
2680- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2681 deleted at process exit time.
2682
2683- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2684 in backslash.
2685
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002686Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002687----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002688
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002689- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2690 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2691 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2692
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002693
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002694What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002695===========================
2696
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002697*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2698
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002699Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002700--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002701
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002702- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2703 been extensively updated. See
2704
2705 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2706
2707 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2708
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002709- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2710 deleted!
2711
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002712- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2713 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2714 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2715 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2716 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2717
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002718- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2719
2720 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2721 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2722
2723 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2724 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2725 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2726 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2727 supported anyway.
2728
2729 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2730 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2731
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002732- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2733 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2734 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2735 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2736 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002737
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002738- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2739 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2740 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2741
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002742Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002743-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002744
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002745- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2746 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2747 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2748 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2749 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2750 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002751 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2752 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2753 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2754 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002755
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002756- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2757 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2758 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2759
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002760Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002761-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002762
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002763- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2764
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002765Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002766-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002767
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002768- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2769 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2770 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2771 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2772 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2773 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2774
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002775- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2776
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002777- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2778
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002779- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2780
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002781- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2782 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2783 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2784
2785- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2786
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002787Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002788-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002789
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002790- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2791 off a search on Google.
2792
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002793Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002795
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002796- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2797 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2798 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2799 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2800 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2801 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2802 other platforms should do likewise.
2803
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002804- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2805 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2806 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2807
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002808C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002809-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002810
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002811- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2812 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2813 producing key-value pairs.
2814
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002815- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002816 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002817 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2818 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2819 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2820 previously went unchallenged.
2821
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002822New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002823-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002824
2825Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002827
2828Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002830
2831Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002832----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002833
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002834- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2835 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002836
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002837- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2838 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2839 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2840 home.
2841
2842
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002843What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002844===========================
2845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002846*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2847
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002848Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002850
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002851- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2852 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002853
2854 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002855 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002856
2857 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2858 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002859 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002860 This needs to be documented.
2861
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002862- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2863 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2864
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002865- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2866 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2867 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2868
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002869- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2870 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2871
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002872- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2873 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2874 class forbids it).
2875
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002876- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2877 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2878 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2879
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002880- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2881
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002882Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002883-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002884
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002885- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2886 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002887 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002888
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002889- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2890 (like 1 + '').
2891
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002892Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002893-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002894
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002895- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2896 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2897 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2898 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002899 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002900 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2901
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002902- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2903 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2904 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2905 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2906
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002907- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2908 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002909 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2910 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2911 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002912
2913- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2914 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002915
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002916- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2917 bytes on its input.
2918
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002919Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002920-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002921
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002922- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002923 convenience function.
2924
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002925- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2926 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2927 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002928 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2929 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2930 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2931 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2932 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2933 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002934
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002935- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2936 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2937 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2938 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2939
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002940- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2941 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2942 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2943
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002944- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2945 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2946 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2947 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2948
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002949- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2950 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002951 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002952 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2953 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2954 new -l and -e options.
2955
2956- statcache is now deprecated.
2957
2958- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2959 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002960 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002961 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2962 time properly taken into account.
2963
2964- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2965 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2966 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2967 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2968
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002969Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002970-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002971
2972Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002974
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002975- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2976 is built with libdb3 if available.
2977
2978- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2979
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002980C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002981-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002982
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002983- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2984 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2985 PySequence_Size().
2986
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002987- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2988
2989- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2990 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2991 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2992
2993- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2994 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2995
2996- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2997 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2998
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002999New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003001
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003002- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3003 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3004
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003005- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3006 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3007
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003008- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3009
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003010Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003012
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003013- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3014 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3015
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003016Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003017-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003018
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003019Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003021
3022- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3023 removed completely in the next release.
3024
3025- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3026 OSX.
3027
3028- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3029 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3030
3031- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3032
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003033
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003034What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003035===========================
3036
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3038
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003039Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003040--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003041
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003042- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003043 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003044 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003045 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3046 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003047 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3048 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003049 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3050 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003051
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003052- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3053 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3054
3055- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3056 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3057
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003058Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003059-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003060
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003061- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3062 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3063 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3064 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3065 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3066 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3067 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3068 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3069
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003070- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3071 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3072 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3073 example).
3074
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003075- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003076 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003077 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003078 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003079
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003080- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3081 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3082 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003083 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003084
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003085- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3086 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3087 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3088 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3089 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3090 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3091
3092 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3093
3094 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3095
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003096Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003097-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003098
3099- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3100
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003101- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3102
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003103- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3104 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003105
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003106- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3107 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3108 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3109 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3110 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3111 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003112 attributes.
3113
3114- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3115 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3116 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003117
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003118- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3119 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3120 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003121
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003122- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3123 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3124 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003125 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3126 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3127
3128- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3129 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003130
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003131Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003132-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003133
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003134- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3135 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3136
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003137- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3138 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3139 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3140 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3141
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003142- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3143 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3144 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3145 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3146
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003147 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3148 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3149 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3150 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3151 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3152 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3153 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3154 without losing information).
3155
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003156- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003157 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3158 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3159 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3160 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3161 module).
3162
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003163 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003164 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3165 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3166 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3167 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003168
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003169- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003170 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3171 encoding.
3172
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003173- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3174 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3175
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003176- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003177 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3178
3179- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3180 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3181 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3182 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3183
3184- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3185
3186- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3187 ON, and OFF.
3188
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003189- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3190 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3191
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003192Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003194
3195- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3196 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3197 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003198
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003199- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3200 been added: -X and -E.
3201
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003202Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003203-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003204
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003205- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3206 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3207
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003208C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003210
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003211- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3212 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3213 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3214 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3215 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3216
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003217- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3218 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3219 as long) arguments.
3220
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003221- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3222 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3223 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3224 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3225 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3226 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3227
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003228- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3229 input.
3230
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003231New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003232-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003233
3234Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003235-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003236
3237Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003239
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003240- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3241 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3242 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3243
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003244- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3245 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3246 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003247 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003248
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003249 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3250 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3251 import signal
3252 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003253
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003254 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003255 while 1:
3256 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003257 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003258 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3259 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3260 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3261 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003262
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003263
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003264What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3265===========================
3266
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003267*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3268
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003269Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003270--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003271
3272- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3273 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3274 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3275
3276- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3277 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3278 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3279 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3280 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3281 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3282 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003283
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003284- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003285 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003286 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3287 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3288 associate a docstring with a property.
3289
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003290- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3291 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3292 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3293 other built-in object types.
3294
3295- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3296 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3297 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3298 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3299 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3300
3301- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3302 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3303
3304- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3305 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003306 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003307 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3308 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3309 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3310 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3311 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3312
3313- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3314 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3315 class.
3316
3317- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3318 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3319 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3320 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3321
3322- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3323 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3324 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3325 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3326
3327- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3328 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3329
3330- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3331 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3332 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3333 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3334 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003335 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003336 with the same value as s.
3337
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003338- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3339
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003340Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003341----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003342
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003343- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3344
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003345- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3346 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3347 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3348 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3349 objects.
3350
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003351- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3352 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003353 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3354 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3355
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003356- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3357 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3358 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3359
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003360Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003362
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003363- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3364 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3365 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3366 by the instances.
3367
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003368- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3369 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3370 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3371
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003372- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3373 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3374 before the entire comparison is complete.
3375
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003376- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3377 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3378 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3379
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003380- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3381 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3382 getwriter().
3383
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003384- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3385 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3386
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003387- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003388 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3389 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3390
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003391- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3392 iterable object.
3393
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003394- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3395 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003396
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003397- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3398 authentication.
3399
3400- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3401 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003402
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003403- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003404 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3405 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3406 a sample driver.)
3407
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003408Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003409-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003410
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003411- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3412 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3413 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3414 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3415 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3416 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3417 kernel has large file support.
3418
3419- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3420 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3421 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3422 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3423 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3424
3425- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3426 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3427 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3428
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003429C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003431
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003432- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3433 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3434
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003435New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003436-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003437
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003438- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3439 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3440
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003441Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003442-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003443
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003444- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3445 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3446 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3447 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3448 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3449
3450- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3451 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3452 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3453 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3454
3455- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3456 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3457
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003458Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003460
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003461- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003462 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3463 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003464
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003465
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003466What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3467===========================
3468
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003469*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3470
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003471Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003472----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003473
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003474- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3475 big to represent as a C double.
3476
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003477- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3478 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3479 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3480 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3481 restriction).
3482
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003483- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3484 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3485 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3486 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3487 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3488
3489 >>> dir([])
3490 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3491 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3492 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3493 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3494 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3495 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3496 'reverse', 'sort']
3497
3498 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3499
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003500- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003501 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3502 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3503 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3504 OverflowError exception.
3505
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003506- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003507 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003508 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3509 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3510 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3511 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3512 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003513 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3515 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3516
3517 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3518 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3519 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3520 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003521
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003522- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003523 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3524 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3525 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3526 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3527 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3528 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3529 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3530 once it is created.
3531
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003532- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3533 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3534 (key, value) pairs.
3535
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003536- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003537 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3538 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3539
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003540- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3541 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3542 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3543 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3544 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003545
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003546- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003547 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3548 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3549
3550 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3551
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003552- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003553 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3554
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003555Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003557
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003558- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003559 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3560 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003561
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003562- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3563 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3564 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3565 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3566 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3567 in this area anymore).
3568
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003569- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3570 threading.Timer.
3571
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003572- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3573 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3574
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003575- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003576 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3577
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003578- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003579 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3580 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3581 converted to Python longs.
3582
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003583- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003584 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3585
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003586- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3587 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3588 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3589
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003590Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003592
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003593- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3594 division operators as per PEP 238.
3595
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003596Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003597-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003598
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003599- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3600 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3601 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3602 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3603
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003604C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003605-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003606
3607- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003608
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003609- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3610 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003611 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003612
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3614 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003615 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003617
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003618- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003619 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3620 module:
3621
3622 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003623
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003624 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3625 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003626
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003627 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3628 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003629
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003630 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3631
3632 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3633
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003634- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003635 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3636 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3637 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003638
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003639New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003640-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003641
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003642- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3643 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3644 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3645 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3646 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003647
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003648Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003650
3651Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003653
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003654- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3655 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3656 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3657 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003658 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3659 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3660 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3661 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3662 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003663
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003664- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003665 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3666
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003667
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003668What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3669===========================
3670
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003671*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3672
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003673Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003675
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003676- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3677 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3678
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003679- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3680 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3681 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003682
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003683- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3684 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3685 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3686 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003687
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003688- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3689
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003691
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003692Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003694
3695- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003696 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003697 the module docstring for details.
3698
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003699Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003701
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003702- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003703 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3704 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3705 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003706
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003707- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3708 Nick Mathewson.
3709
3710Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003711----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003712
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003713- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3714 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3715 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3716 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3717 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3718 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3719 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3720 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3721
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003722- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3723 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3724 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3725 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3726
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003727- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3728 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3729 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3730 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3731 come a long way).
3732
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003733- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3734 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3735 write filters for these warnings).
3736
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003737- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3738 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3739 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3740 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3741 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3742
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003743- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3744 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3745 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3746 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3747 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3748 older distribution.
3749
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003750Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003751-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003752
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003753- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3754 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003755 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003756
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003757- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3758 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3759 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3760
3761- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3762
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003763- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3764
3765- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3766
3767- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3768
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003769- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003770
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003771- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3772
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003773New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003775
3776C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003777-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003778
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003779- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3780 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3781 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3782 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3783 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3784 against buffer overruns.
3785
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003786- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003787 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3788 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003789 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3790 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3791 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3792
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003793- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3794 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3795 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3796 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3797 deprecated.
3798
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003799Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003800-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003801
3802- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3803 relevant is found.
3804
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003805
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003806What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003807===========================
3808
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3810
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003811Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003812----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003813
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003814- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3815 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3816 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3817 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3818 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3819 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3820 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3821 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003822 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003823 repaired.
3824
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003825- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003826 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003827 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3828 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3829 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3830 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3831 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3832 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3833 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3834 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3835
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003836- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3837 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3838 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3839 leading BMO character).
3840
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003841- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3842 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3843 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3844
3845 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3846 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3847 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003848
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003849 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3850 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3851 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3852 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3853 for various simple to use conversions.
3854
3855 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3856 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3857
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003858 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3859 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3860 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3861 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3862 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3863 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3864 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3865 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3866 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3867 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3868 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3869 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3870 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3871 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3872 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003873
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003874- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3875 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3876 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003877 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003878 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003879
3880 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003881 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3882 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3883 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3884 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3885 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003886 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3887 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003888
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003889 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3890 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3891 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003892 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003893
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003894- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3895 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3896 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3897 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3898 floating arithmetic,
3899
3900 x = 9007199254740992.0
3901 print long(x)
3902
3903 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3904 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3905 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3906 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3907 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3908 functions are of good quality).
3909
3910 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3911 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3912 algorithms to break.
3913
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003914- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3915 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3916 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3917 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3918 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3919 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3920 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3921 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3922 order.
3923
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003924- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3925 operation along the most common code paths.
3926
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003927- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3928 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3929
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003930- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3931 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3932 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3933 {}.update(UserDict())
3934
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003935- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3936 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3937 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3938 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3939 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3940 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3941 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3942 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3943
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003944- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003945 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003947 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003948 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3949 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003950 join() method of strings
3951 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003952 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3953 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003955 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003956
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003957- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3958 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3959
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003960- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3961 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3962
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003963- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3964 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3965 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3966 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3967
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003968- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3969 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003970 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003971 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3972 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003973
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003974- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3975
3976
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003977Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003979
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003980- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003981 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003982 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3983 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3984
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003985- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3986 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3987
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003988- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3989 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3990 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3991 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3992
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003993- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3994 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3995 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3996
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003997- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3998
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003999- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4000
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004001- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4002 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4003 that are still imported into string.py).
4004
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004005- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4006
4007- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4008 Now it does.
4009
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004010- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4011
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004012- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4013 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4014 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4015 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4016 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004017 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4018 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004019
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004020- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4021 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4022 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4023 'help(object)'.
4024
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004025Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004027
4028- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004029 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004030 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4031 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4032
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004033- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004034 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4035 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004036
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004037C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004039
4040- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4041 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042
4043----
4044
4045**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**