blob: 08a8f43b65ca809faba44ff3e6de98d0d03a84f0 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10Core and builtins
11-----------------
12
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000013- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
14 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error)
15
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000016- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
17
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000018- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
19 returning None.
20
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000021- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
22 ('\') with a specific error message.
23
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000024- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
25
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000026- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
27 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
28
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000029- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000030 an ferror() call.
31
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000032- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
33 list.sort().
34
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000035- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
36 (2+3) --> (5).
37
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000038- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
39
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000040- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
41 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000042
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000043- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
44 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
45 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
46
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000047Extension Modules
48-----------------
49
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000050- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
51 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
52
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000053- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
54 file size.
55
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000056- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
57
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000058- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
59 {remove_history,replace_history}
60
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000061- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
62 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000063
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000064- stat_float_times is now True.
65
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000066- array.array objects are now picklable.
67
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +000068- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
69 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
70
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +000071- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
72 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
73 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
74
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +000075- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
76 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000077
78Library
79-------
80
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +000081- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
82
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +000083- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
84 to build.
85
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +000086- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
87 symbolic links on Windows.
88
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +000089- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
90 profile.py if available.
91
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +000092- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
93
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +000094- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
95 in LWPCookieJar.
96
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +000097- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
98
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +000099- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
100
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000101- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
102
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000103- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
104
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000105- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
106
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000107- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
108
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000109- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
110
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000111- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
112
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000113- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
114 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
115 be exploited in various ways.
116
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000117- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
118
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000119- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
120
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000121- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
122
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000123- Enhancements to the csv module:
124
125 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
126 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
127 PEP 305.
128 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
129 reporting.
130 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
131 dictates.
132 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000133 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000134 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000135 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
136 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000137 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
138 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000139 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000140 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
141 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
142 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
143 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
144 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
145 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
146 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
147 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
148 without first creating a dialect class.
149 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
150 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
151 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000152 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000153 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
154 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000155 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
156 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
157 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
158 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000159 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
160 This has been fixed.
161
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000162- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
163 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
164 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
165 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
166
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000167- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
168
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000169- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
170 (Bug #951915).
171
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000172- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
173 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
174 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
175 encoding alias table
176
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000177- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
178
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000179- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
180 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
181
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000182- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
183
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000184- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
185
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000186- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
187
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000188- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
189
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000190- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
191
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000192- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
193 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
194 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
195
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000196- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000197 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000198
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000199- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
200 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
201 tokenizer with very long source lines.
202
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000203- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
204 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
205
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000206- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
207 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000208
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000209- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
210 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
211
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000212- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
213 correctly.
214
215
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000216Build
217-----
218
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000219- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
220 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
221
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000222- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
223 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
224 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
225 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
226 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
227 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
228 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
229 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
230
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000231- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
232 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
233 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
234 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
235
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000236
237C API
238-----
239
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000240- Removed PyRange_New().
241
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000242
243Tests
244-----
245
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000246- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000247
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000248
249Documentation
250-------------
251
252- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
253 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
254 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
255
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000256Mac
257---
258
259
260
261Tools/Demos
262-----------
263
264
265
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000266What's New in Python 2.4 final?
267===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000268
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000269*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000270
271Core and builtins
272-----------------
273
274- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
275 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
276 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
277
278
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000279What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
280==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000281
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000282*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000283
284Core and builtins
285-----------------
286
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000287- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
288 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
289 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
290
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000291
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000292Library
293-------
294
295- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
296 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
297 raised is re-raised.
298
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000299- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
300 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
301
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000302- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
303 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
304 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
305 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
306 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
307 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
308 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
309 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
310 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
311 by the slice are recomputed now.
312
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000313- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000314
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000315Build
316-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000317
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000318- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
319 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
320 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000321
322C API
323-----
324
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000325- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
326
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000327
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000328What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
329================================
330
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000331*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000332
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000333License
334-------
335
336The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
337is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
338changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
339Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
340intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
341durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
342the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
343License::
344
345 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
346
347says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
348to Python 2.1.1.
349
350The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
351License Version 2.
352
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000353Core and builtins
354-----------------
355
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000356- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
357 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
358 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
359 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
360 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
361 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
362 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
363 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
364 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
365 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
366
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000367- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000368
369Extension Modules
370-----------------
371
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000372- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
373 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
374 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
375 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000376
377Library
378-------
379
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000380- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
381 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
382 returned.
383
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000384- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
385
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000386- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
387 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
388
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000389- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
390
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000391- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
392 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000393
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000394- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
395
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000396- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
397
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000398- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000399 the source code is updated and reloaded.
400
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000401Build
402-----
403
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000404- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000405
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000406What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
407================================
408
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000409*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000410
411Core and builtins
412-----------------
413
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000414- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000415 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
416
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000417- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
418 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
419 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
420 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
421
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000422- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
423 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
424
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000425- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
426 constant.
427
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000428- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
429 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
430 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
431 large), and to anomalies such as
432 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
433 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
434 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
435 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000436
437Extension modules
438-----------------
439
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000440- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
441 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000442 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
443 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
444 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000445
446Library
447-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000448
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000449- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000450 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000451 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
452 --swig-cpp.
453
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000454- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
455 it is set.
456
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000457- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000458
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000459- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
460 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
461 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
462 Closes bug #1039270.
463
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000464- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000465
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000466 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000467 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
468 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
469 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
470 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
471 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
472 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
473 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
474 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
475 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
476 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
477 + Updates to documentation.
478
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000479- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
480 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
481 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
482 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
483
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000484- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000485
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000486- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
487 applications should use the getmember function.
488
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000489- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
490
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000491- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
492 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
493 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
494 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
495 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
496 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
497 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
498 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
499 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
500
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000501- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
502 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000503 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000504
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000505- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
506 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
507 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
508 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
509 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
510 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
511 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
512 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000513
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000514- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
515 the new public features (of which there are many).
516
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000517- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000518 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
519 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
520 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
521 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000522 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000523
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000524- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
525
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000526- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
527 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
528 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
529 options.
530
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000531- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
532 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
533 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
534 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
535 conditions under which non-string values work.
536
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000537Build
538-----
539
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000540- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
541 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
542 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
543
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000544- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
545 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
546 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
547 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
548 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000549
550C API
551-----
552
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000553- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
554 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
555
556- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
557
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000558- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
559 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
560 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
561 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
562 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
563 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
564 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
565 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
566 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
567
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000568- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
569
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000570- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
571 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
572 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000573
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000574Tests
575-----
576
577- test__locale ported to unittest
578
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000579Mac
580---
581
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000582- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
583 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
584 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000585
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000586Tools/Demos
587-----------
588
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000589- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
590 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
591 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
592 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
593 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000594
595
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000596What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
597=================================
598
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000599*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000600
601Core and builtins
602-----------------
603
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000604- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000605 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
606
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000607- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
608 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
609 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
610 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
611 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
612 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
613 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
614 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000615 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
616 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
617 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
618 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
619 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000620
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000621- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
622 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
623 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
624 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
625 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
626
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000627- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
628
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000629- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
630 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
631
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000632- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
633 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
634 modified the list.
635
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000636- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
637 functions is now writable.
638
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000639- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
640 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
641 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
642 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
643
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000644- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
645 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
646 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
647 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
648 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000649
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000650- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
651 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
652
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000653Extension modules
654-----------------
655
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000656- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
657
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000658- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
659 data.
660
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000661- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
662 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
663 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
664 supposed to have been truncated away.
665
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000666- Added socket.socketpair().
667
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000668- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
669 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
670
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000671- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000672 versions of Python, have now been removed.
673
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000674Library
675-------
676
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000677- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000678 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000679
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000680- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
681 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
682
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000683- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
684 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
685
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000686- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
687
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000688- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
689 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000690
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000691- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
692 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
693
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000694- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
695
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000696- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
697
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000698- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
699
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000700- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
701 Percivall.
702
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000703- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
704 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
705
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000706- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
707 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
708 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000709 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000710
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000711- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
712 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
713 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
714 and exponent.
715
716- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
717
718- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
719 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
720 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
721
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000722- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
723 to the readline module.
724
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000725- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000726 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
727 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000728
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000729- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
730 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
731 contains symlinks.
732
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000733- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
734 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
735
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000736- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
737 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
738 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
739
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000740- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
741 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
742 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
743 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
744 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
745 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
746 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
747 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
748 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
749 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
750 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
751 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
752 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
753
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000754- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
755
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000756Tools/Demos
757-----------
758
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000759- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
760 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
761
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000762- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
763
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000764Build
765-----
766
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000767- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
768 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
769 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
770 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
771 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
772 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
773 plans to do so.
774
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000775- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
776 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
777
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000778- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
779 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
780
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000781- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
782 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
783
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000784- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
785 GNU/k*BSD systems.
786
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000787- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
788 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
789
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000790C API
791-----
792
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000793..
794
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000795Documentation
796-------------
797
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000798- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
799 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
800
801- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
802 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
803 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000804
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000805New platforms
806-------------
807
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000808- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
809
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000810Tests
811-----
812
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000813..
814
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000815Windows
816-------
817
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000818- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
819 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
820 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
821 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
822 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
823 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
824 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
825 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
826 the problem.
827
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000828Mac
829---
830
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000831..
832
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000833
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000834What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
835=================================
836
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000837*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000838
839Core and builtins
840-----------------
841
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000842- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
843 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
844 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
845 sensitive code.
846
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000847- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000848 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000849
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000850 @staticmethod
851 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000852
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000853 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000854
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000855- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
856 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
857 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
858 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
859 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
860 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
861 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
862 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
863 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
864 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
865 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
866
867 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
868 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
869 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
870 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
871 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
872 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
873 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
874
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000875- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
876 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
877
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000878- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000879 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000880
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000881- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000882 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000883 which was missing for no apparent reason.
884
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000885- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000886 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
887 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
888
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000889- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
890 types that support garbage collection.
891
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000892- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
893
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000894- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
895 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
896 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
897 Jython.
898
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000899- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
900
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000901- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
902 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
903
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000904- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
905 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
906 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000907
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000908- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
909 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
910 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
911
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000912Extension modules
913-----------------
914
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000915- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
916
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000917Library
918-------
919
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000920- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
921 TIS-620
922
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000923- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
924 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
925 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
926 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
927 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
928 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
929 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
930 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
931 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
932 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
933
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000934- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
935
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000936- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
937 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
938 same as when the argument is omitted).
939 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
940
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000941- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
942
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000943- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
944 schemes are offered.
945
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000946- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
947
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000948- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
949 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
950 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
951
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000952- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
953
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000954- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
955 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
956
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000957- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
958 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
959 when dummy_threading is being used.
960
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000961- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
962 from a tarfile.
963
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000964- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000965 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000966
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000967- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
968 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
969 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
970 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
971
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000972- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
973 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
974
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000975- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
976 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
977 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
978 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
979 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
980 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
981 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
982 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
983 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
984 by some other method in progress).
985
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000986- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
987 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
988 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000989
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000990- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
991
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000992- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
993 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
994 AM Kuchling.
995
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000996- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
997 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
998 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
999
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001000- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1001 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1002 instead of unsigned.
1003
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001004- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001005 no longer part of the public API.
1006
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001007- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1008 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1009 string methods of the same name).
1010
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001011- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001012 SF patch 945642.
1013
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001014- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1015
1016 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1017
1018 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1019 DocTestSuites.
1020
1021- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1022 that provide thread-local data.
1023
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001024- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1025 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1026
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001027- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1028
1029- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1030 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1031 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1032
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001033- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1034
1035 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1036 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1037 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001038
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001039 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1040 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1041 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1042 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1043
1044 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1045 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1046
1047 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1048 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1049 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1050 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1051
1052 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1053 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1054 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1055 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1056 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1057
1058 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1059 wrapping help output.
1060
1061 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1062 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1063 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001064
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001065C API
1066-----
1067
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001068- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1069 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1070 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1071 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1072 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1073 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1074 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1075 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1076 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1077 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1078 its visible semantics have not changed.
1079
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001080- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1081 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1082
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001083Documentation
1084-------------
1085
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001086- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001087
1088 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001089 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001090
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001091 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001092
1093 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1094
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001095- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001096
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001097Tests
1098-----
1099
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001100- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001101 platforms that use the Makefile.
1102
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001103- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1104 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1105 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1106
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001107
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001108What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1109=================================
1110
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001111*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001112
1113Core and builtins
1114-----------------
1115
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001116- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1117 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1118 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1119 objects now (one object instead of three).
1120
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001121- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1122 Windows DLLs.
1123
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001124- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1125 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001126
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001127- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1128 a new .pyc magic.
1129
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001130- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1131 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1132 be there.
1133
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001134- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1135 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1136 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1137
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001138- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1139 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1140 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1141
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001142- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1143
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001144- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1145 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1146 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001147
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001148- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1149 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1150
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001151- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1152
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001153- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001154 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001155
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001156- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1157
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001158- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1159
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001160- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1161 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1162
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001163- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1164 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1165 Fixes bug #858016 .
1166
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001167- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1168 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1169 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1170
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001171- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1172 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1173 improves their performance (about 35%).
1174
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001175- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1176 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1177 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1178
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001179- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1180 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1181 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1182 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1183
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001184- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1185 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
1186 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
1187 length is not known).
1188
1189- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1190 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001191 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1192 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001193 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1194
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001195- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1196 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1197
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001198- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1199 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1200 keyword arguments.
1201
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001202- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1203 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1204 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1205
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001206- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1207 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1208 cases.
1209
1210- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1211 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1212 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1213 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1214 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1215 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1216 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1217 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1218 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1219 a release build.
1220
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001221- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1222 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1223
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001224- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001225 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001226
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001227- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1228 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1229 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1230 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1231 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1232 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1233 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1234 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1235 destroyed.
1236
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001237- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1238 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1239 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1240 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1241 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1242 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1243 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1244 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1245
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001246- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1247 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1248 character other than a space.
1249
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001250- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1251 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1252 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1253 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1254 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1255 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1256 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1257 attributes with the same name.
1258
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001259- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1260 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1261 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1262 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1263 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1264 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1265 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1266 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1267 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1268 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1269 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1270 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1271 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1272 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001273
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001274- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1275 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1276 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1277 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1278 This has been repaired.
1279
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001280- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1281
1282- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1283
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001284- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1285 over a sequence.
1286
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001287- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001288 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001289
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001290- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1291
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001292- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1293 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1294 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1295 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1296 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1297 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1298 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1299 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1300
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001301- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1302 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1303 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1304
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001305- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1306 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1307 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1308 freelist.
1309
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001310- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1311 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1312
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001313- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1314 number.
1315
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001316- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1317 a TypeError exception.
1318
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001319- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1320 820195.
1321
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001322- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1323 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1324 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1325
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001326- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001327 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1328 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001329
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001330- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1331 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1332 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1333
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001334- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1335 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001336 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001337
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001338- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001339 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1340 the first call.
1341
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001342
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001343Extension modules
1344-----------------
1345
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001346- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1347 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1348
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001349- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1350 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1351 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1352 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1353 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1354 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1355 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001356
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001357- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1358
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001359- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1360
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001361- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1362 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1363
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001364- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1365 fewer false positives.
1366
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001367- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1368 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1369
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001370- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001371 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1372
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001373- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001374 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001375 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001376 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1377 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001378
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001379- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1380 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1381 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1382 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1383
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001384- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1385 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1386 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1387 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1388 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1389 #897625.
1390
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001391- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1392 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1393
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001394- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1395 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1396 and pops on either side of the deque.
1397
1398- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1399 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1400
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001401- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1402 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1403 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1404 other functions that expect a function argument.
1405
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001406- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1407
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001408- os.getsid was added.
1409
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001410- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1411 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1412 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1413
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001414- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1415
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001416- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1417
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001418- readline.clear_history was added.
1419
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001420- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1421
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001422- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1423
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001424- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1425
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001426- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1427
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001428- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1429
1430- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1431
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001432- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1433
1434- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1435
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001436- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1437 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1438 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1439
1440- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1441 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1442 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1443 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1444 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1445 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1446 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1447
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001448- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1449 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1450 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1451 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001452
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001453- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001454 iterators from a single iterable.
1455
1456- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1457 of raising a TypeError exception.
1458
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001459- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1460 as parameter.
1461
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001462Library
1463-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001464
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001465- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1466 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1467 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001468
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001469- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1470 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1471 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001472
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001473- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001474
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001475- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1476 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001477
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001478- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1479 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1480
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001481- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1482
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001483- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001484 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001485
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001486- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001487 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001488
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001489- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1490
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001491- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1492 on cygwin and mingw32.
1493
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001494- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1495
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001496- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1497 module.
1498
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001499- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1500 installation scheme for all platforms.
1501
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001502- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001503 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001504
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001505- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1506 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1507 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1508
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001509- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1510 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1511 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1512
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001513- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1514
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001515- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1516
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001517- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1518 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1519
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001520- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1521 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1522 type pattern with the same value exists.
1523
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001524- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1525 when run from the command prompt).
1526
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001527- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1528 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1529
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001530- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1531 default sort).
1532
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001533- Added global runctx function to profile module
1534
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001535- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1536
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001537- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1538
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001539- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1540
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001541- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001542 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1543 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1544 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1545 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1546 accordingly.
1547
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001548- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1549 decoding standards.
1550
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001551- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1552 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1553 called for all requests.
1554
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001555- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1556 they are passed to the compiler.
1557
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001558- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1559 indent, width and depth.
1560
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001561- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1562 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1563
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001564- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1565 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1566
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001567- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1568
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001569- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1570
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001571- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1572
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001573- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1574 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1575
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001576- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001577 for better performance.
1578
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001579- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001580
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001581- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1582 a string).
1583
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001584- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1585
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001586- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1587
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001588- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1589
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001590- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1591
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001592- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1593 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1594 list of fieldnames.
1595
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001596- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1597 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1598
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001599- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1600
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001601- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1602 empty lists.
1603
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001604- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1605 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1606 and shelves.
1607
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001608- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1609 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1610
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001611- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001612 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1613 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001614
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001615- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1616 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001617 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001618
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001619- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001620 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1621 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1622
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001623- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1624 and removed in Py2.4.
1625
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001626- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1627
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001628- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1629
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001630Tools/Demos
1631-----------
1632
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001633- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1634 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1635
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001636- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1637
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001638- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1639 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1640 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1641 destination in situations where both files are given.
1642
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001643- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1644 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1645 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1646 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1647
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001648- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1649
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001650- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1651 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1652 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1653 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1654 now.
1655
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001656- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1657 in effect
1658
1659- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1660 C-c C-h
1661
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001662- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1663 -d option was given.
1664
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001665Build
1666-----
1667
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001668- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1669 build under OS X.
1670
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001671- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1672 --enable-profiling.
1673
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001674- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1675 is configured --with-tsc.
1676
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001677- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1678 on AMD64.
1679
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001680- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1681 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1682
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001683- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1684 removed.
1685
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001686- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1687 supported (see PEP 11).
1688
1689- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1690
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001691- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1692
1693- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1694 (see PEP 11).
1695
1696- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1697 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1698
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001699C API
1700-----
1701
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001702- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1703 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1704 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1705
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001706- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1707 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1708 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1709 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1710
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001711- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1712 generator objects.
1713
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001714- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1715 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001716 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1717 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001718
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001719- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1720 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1721
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001722- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1723 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1724 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1725 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1726 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1727
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001728- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1729 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1730 about 10% faster.
1731
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001732- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1733 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1734
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001735- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1736 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1737 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1738 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1739
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001740Windows
1741-------
1742
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001743- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1744 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1745 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1746 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1747
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001748- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1749 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1750 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1751
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001752
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001753What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1754===============================
1755
1756*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1757
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001758IDLE
1759----
1760
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001761- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1762 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1763 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1764 context-menu actions.
1765
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001766- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1767 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1768 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1769 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1770 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1771 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1772 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1773 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1774 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1775
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001776
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001777What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1778=============================================
1779
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001780*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001781
1782Core and builtins
1783-----------------
1784
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001785- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001786 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001787 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1788
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001789Extension modules
1790-----------------
1791
1792- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1793 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1794 than once. This has been fixed.
1795
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001796- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1797 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1798 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1799 call.
1800
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001801- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1802
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001803Library
1804-------
1805
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001806- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1807 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1808
1809- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1810 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1811 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1812 restored.
1813
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001814IDLE
1815----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001816
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001817- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001818
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001819Build
1820-----
1821
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001822- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1823 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1824
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001825C API
1826-----
1827
1828Windows
1829-------
1830
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001831- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1832 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1833
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001834- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1835
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001836Mac
1837---
1838
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001839- Various fixes to pimp.
1840
1841- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1842
1843- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1844 more problems than it solves.
1845
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001846
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001847What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1848=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001849
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001850*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1851
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001852Core and builtins
1853-----------------
1854
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001855- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1856 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1857
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001858- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1859 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001860 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001861
1862- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1863 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1864 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001865 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001866
1867- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1868 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001869
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001870- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1871 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1872 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1873
1874- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001875 770247.
1876
1877- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001878
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001879Extension modules
1880-----------------
1881
1882- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1883 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1884
1885- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1886
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001887- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1888
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001889- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1890 contained within the _strptime module.
1891
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001892- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1893 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1894
1895- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001896 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1897
1898- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1899 the find_class attribute, if present.
1900
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001901- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001902
1903 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1904 (SF bug 763298).
1905
1906 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001907 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1908 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1909 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001910
1911 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1912
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001913Library
1914-------
1915
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001916- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1917
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001918- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1919 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1920 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1921 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1922 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1923 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1924 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1925 or Tester().
1926
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001927- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1928 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1929 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1930 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1931 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1932 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1933 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1934 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1935 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001936
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001937 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001938
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001939- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1940 weren't before was an oversight.
1941
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001942- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1943 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1944
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001945- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1946 when there are no lines.
1947
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001948- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1949 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1950
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001951- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1952 to child processes.
1953
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001954- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1955
1956- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1957
1958- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1959 xmlrpclib.
1960
1961- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1962 responses.
1963
1964- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1965 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1966
1967- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1968 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1969 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1970
1971- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1972 used as patterns.
1973
1974- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1975 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1976 than Tk 8.3.
1977
1978- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1979
1980- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001981
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001982Tools/Demos
1983-----------
1984
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001985- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1986
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001987- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1988
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001989- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001990
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001991Build
1992-----
1993
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001994- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1995
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001996- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1997
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001998- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1999 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002000
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002001- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2002 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2003 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002004
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002005C API
2006-----
2007
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002008- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2009 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2010
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002011Windows
2012-------
2013
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002014- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2015 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2016 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2017 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2018 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2019 Python exception ::
2020
2021 thread.error: can't start new thread
2022
2023 is raised now.
2024
2025- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2026 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2027 instead of from DLL teardown.
2028
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002029Mac
2030---
2031
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002032- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002033 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002034 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2035 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2036 the executable in the bundle.
2037
2038- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002039
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002040- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2041
2042- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2043 on Panther.
2044
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002045What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2046================================
2047
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002048*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002049
2050Core and builtins
2051-----------------
2052
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002053- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2054 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2055 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2056 with the -i option.
2057
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002058- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2059 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2060
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002061- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2062 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2063
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002064- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2065 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2066 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2067 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2068 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2069 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2070 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2071 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2072 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2073 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2074 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2075 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2076 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002077
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002078- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2079 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2080 embedded in a lambda expression.
2081
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002082- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2083 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2084 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2085 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2086 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2087
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002088- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2089 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2090 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2091
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002092- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2093 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2094
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002095- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2096 It's writable again.
2097
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002098- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2099 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2100 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002101 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002102
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002103- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2104 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2105 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2106
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002107Extension modules
2108-----------------
2109
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002110- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2111 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2112
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002113- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2114 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2115 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2116 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2117
2118- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2119 collection.
2120
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002121- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2122 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2123 unique within a single program run.
2124
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002125- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2126 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2127
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002128- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2129 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2130
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002131- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2132 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002133
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002134- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2135
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002136- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2137 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2138
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002139- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2140 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2141 for many BSD-derived systems.
2142
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002143
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002144Library
2145-------
2146
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002147- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2148 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2149 primary ones:
2150
2151 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2152 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2153 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2154
2155 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2156 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2157 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2158 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2159 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2160 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2161
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002162- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2163 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2164 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2165 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2166 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2167 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2168 argument.
2169
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002170- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2171 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2172 in the archive.
2173
2174- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2175 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2176
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002177- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2178 569574).
2179
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002180- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2181 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2182 no more.
2183
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002184- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2185 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2186 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2187 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2188 code coverage.
2189
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002190- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2191 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2192 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002193 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2194 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002195
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002196- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2197 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2198 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002199 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002200
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002201- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2202
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002203- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2204 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2205 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2206 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2207
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002208- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2209 handling.
2210
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002211- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2212 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2213
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002214- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2215 in socket.py.
2216
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002217- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2218
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002219- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2220 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2221 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2222 opener with proxy support.
2223
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002224- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2225
2226- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2227
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002228Tools/Demos
2229-----------
2230
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002231- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2232
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002233- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2234
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002235- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2236 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002237
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002238- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2239 files.
2240
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002241Build
2242-----
2243
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002244- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002245 different root directory.
2246
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002247C API
2248-----
2249
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002250- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2251 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2252 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2253 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2254 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2255 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2256 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2257 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2258 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2259 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2260
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002261- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2262 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2263 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2264 from Python.
2265
2266
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002267New platforms
2268-------------
2269
2270None this time.
2271
2272Tests
2273-----
2274
2275- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2276 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2277
2278Windows
2279-------
2280
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002281- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2282
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002283- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2284 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2285 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2286 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2287 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2288 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2289 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2290 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2291 that's what it's for.
2292
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002293Mac
2294---
2295
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002296- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2297 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2298 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2299 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002300- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2301 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2302- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002303
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002304SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2305------------------------------------
2306
2307430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2308598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2309622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2310661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2311683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2312697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2313713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2314724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2315727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2316729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2317730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2318731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2319732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2320733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2321735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2322740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2323744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2324745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2325747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2326749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2327751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2328753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2329755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2330757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2331760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2332
2333
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002334What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2335================================
2336
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002337*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002338
2339Core and builtins
2340-----------------
2341
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002342- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2343 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2344
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002345- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2346 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2347 and cannot be strings).
2348
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002349- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2350 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2351 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2352 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2353
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002354- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2355 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2356 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2357 Python itself.
2358
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002359- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2360 the referenced object, if it has one.
2361
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002362- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2363 the thread started at
2364 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2365
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002366- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2367 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2368 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2369 placed on a list index.
2370
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002371- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2372 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2373 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2374 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2375
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002376- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2377 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2378 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2379 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2380 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2381 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2382 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2383
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002384- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2385 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2386 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2387 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2388 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2389
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002390- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2391 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002392
2393- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2394 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2395 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2396 #693195.)
2397
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002398- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2399 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002400
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002401- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002402 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002403 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2404 interpreter executions, would fail.
2405
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002406- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002407 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002408 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002409
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002410Extension modules
2411-----------------
2412
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002413- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2414 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2415 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2416 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2417
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002418- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2419 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2420
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002421- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2422 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2423 and Greg Chapman.)
2424
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002425- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2426 recursively.
2427
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002428- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002429 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2430 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2431 leaks.
2432
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002433- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2434
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002435- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2436 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2437 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2438 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2439 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2440 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2441 #705836.
2442
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002443- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002444 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2445
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002446- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2447 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2448 See SF bug #692416.
2449
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002450- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2451 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2452
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002453- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2454 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2455 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002456
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002457- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002458 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2459 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2460
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002461- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2462 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2463 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2464 timeouts to work properly.
2465
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002466Library
2467-------
2468
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002469- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2470 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2471 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2472 future release.
2473
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002474- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2475 for querying platform dependent features.
2476
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002477- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002478
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002479- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2480 pickle protocol versions.
2481
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002482- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2483 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2484 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2485
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002486- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2487
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002488- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2489 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2490 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2491 modules.
2492
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002493- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2494 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2495 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2496
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002497- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2498 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2499
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002500- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2501 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2502 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2503
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002504- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002505 MS Office extensions.
2506
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002507- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2508 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2509
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002510- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2511 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2512
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002513- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2514 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2515 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2516 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2517 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2518 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2519
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002520- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2521 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2522 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002523
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002524- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2525 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2526 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2527
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002528- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2529
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002530- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2531 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2532 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2533
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002534Tools/Demos
2535-----------
2536
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002537- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2538 See the module docstring for details.
2539
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002540Build
2541-----
2542
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002543- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2544 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002545
2546C API
2547-----
2548
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002549- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2550
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002551- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2552 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2553 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2554
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002555- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2556 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002557
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002558 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2559 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2560 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002561
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002562- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002563 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2564
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002565- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2566 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2567 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002568
2569New platforms
2570-------------
2571
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002572None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002573
2574Tests
2575-----
2576
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002577- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2578 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002579
2580Windows
2581-------
2582
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002583- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2584 function.
2585
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002586- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2587 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002588
2589Mac
2590---
2591
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002592- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2593 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002594
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002595- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2596 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002597
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002598- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2599 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2600 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002601
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002602- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002603 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2604 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002605
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002606- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2607 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002608
2609
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002610What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2611=================================
2612
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002613*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002614
2615Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002616-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002617
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002618- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2619 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2620 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2621
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002622- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2623 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2624 (SF patch #664376.)
2625
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002626- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2627 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2628 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2629 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2630 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2631 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002632 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002633
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002634- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2635 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2636 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2637 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002638 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002639
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002640- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2641 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2642 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2643 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2644 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2645 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2646 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2647 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2648 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2649 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2650 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2651
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002652- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2653 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2654 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2655 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2656 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2657 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2658
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002659- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2660 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2661
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002662- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2663 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2664 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2665 case.)
2666
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002667- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2668 passed as unicode strings.
2669
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002670- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2671 See SF bug #683467.
2672
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002673- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2674 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2675
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002676- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2677
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002678- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2679
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002680- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2681 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2682 arguments.
2683
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002684- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2685 See SF bug #667147.
2686
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002687- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002688 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002689 See SF bug #676155.
2690
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002691- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002692 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002693 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2694 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2695 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2696 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2697 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2698 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002699
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002700Extension modules
2701-----------------
2702
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002703- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2704 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2705 tp_as_number pointer.
2706
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002707- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2708 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2709 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2710 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2711 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2712
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002713- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2714
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002715- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2716
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002717- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002718 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002719 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2720 patch #678531.)
2721
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002722- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2723 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2724
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002725- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2726 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2727
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002728- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2729
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002730- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2731 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2732 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2733
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002734- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2735
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002736- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2737 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2738
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002739- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002740
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002741- datetime changes:
2742
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002743 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2744
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002745 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2746 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2747 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2748 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2749 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2750 now.
2751
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002752 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002753 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2754 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002755
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002756 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002757 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002758 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2759 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2760 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2761 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002762
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002763 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2764 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2765 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002766 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2767
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002768 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2769 by a later example coded by Guido.
2770
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002771 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002772 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2773 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2774 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002775 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2776 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2777
2778 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2779 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2780 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2781 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2782 tzinfo subclass instance.
2783
2784 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2785 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2786 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2787 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2788 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2789 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2790 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2791 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002792
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002793 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2794 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2795 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2796 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2797 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002798 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2799
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002800 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002801
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002802 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2803 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2804 as a naive datetime object.
2805
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002806 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2807 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2808 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2809
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002810 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2811 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2812 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2813 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2814 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2815 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2816 comparison.
2817
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002818 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2819 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2820 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2821 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002822 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002823
2824 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002825
2826 and ::
2827
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002828 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2829
2830 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2831 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2832 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2833 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2834
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002835 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2836 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2837 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2838 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2839 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2840
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002841 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2842 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002843 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2844 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002845
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002846Library
2847-------
2848
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002849- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2850 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2851
2852- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2853 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2854 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2855 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2856 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2857 See PEP 307 for details.
2858
2859- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2860 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2861
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002862- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2863 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002864 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002865 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2866 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002867 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002868
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002869- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2870 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2871
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002872- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2873 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2874 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2875
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002876- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2877
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002878- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2879 exception.
2880
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002881- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2882 class.
2883
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002884- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2885 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2886 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2887
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002888- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2889 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2890
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002891- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002892 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2893 See SF bug #659228.
2894
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002895- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2896 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2897 See SF patch #651082.
2898
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002899- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002900
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002901- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2902 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2903
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002904- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002905 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002906
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002907- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2908 DOS paths from other platforms.
2909
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002910Tools/Demos
2911-----------
2912
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002913- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2914 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2915 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2916 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2917 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2918 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2919 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2920 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2921 example:
2922
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002923 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2924 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002925
2926 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2927
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002928
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002929Build
2930-----
2931
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002932- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2933 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2934 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002935 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2936
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002937 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2938
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002939- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2940 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2941 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2942 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2943 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2944 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2945 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2946 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2947 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2948
2949- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2950 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2951 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2952 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2953
2954- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2955 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2956
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002957C API
2958-----
2959
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002960- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2961 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002962
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002963- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2964 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2965 tp_as_number pointer.
2966
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002967- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2968 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2969 (SF #681367)
2970
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002971- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2972 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2973 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2974 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002975
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002976Tests
2977-----
2978
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002979- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002980 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2981 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2982 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2983 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2984 pydoc.)
2985
2986- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2987
2988- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002989
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002990Windows
2991-------
2992
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002993- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2994 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2995 time).
2996
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002997- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2998 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2999
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003000- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3001 release without strong cryptography.
3002
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003003- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003004 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003005
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003006- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3007 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3008
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003009Mac
3010---
3011
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003012- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3013 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003014
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003015- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3016 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3017 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003018
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003019- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3020 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003021
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003022- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3023 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3024 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3025 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003026
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003027- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003028 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3029 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3030 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003031
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003032
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003033What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003034=================================
3035
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003036*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003038Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003039--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003040
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003041- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3042
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003043- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3044 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003045 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003046 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003047 a different meaning than before.
3048
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003049- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003050 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003051 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003052
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003053- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003054 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003055 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003056
3057- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3058 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3059 and deallocation.
3060
3061- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3062 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3063
3064- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3065 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3066 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3067 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3068 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3069
3070- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3071 now detected by the garbage collector.
3072
3073- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3074 [SF bug 519621]
3075
3076- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3077 identifier.
3078
3079- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3080 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3081 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3082 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3083 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3084 [SF bug 563060]
3085
3086- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3087 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3088 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3089 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3090 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3091
3092- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3093 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3094 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3095
3096- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3097
3098- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3099 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3100 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3101 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3102 state of the slots would be lost.)
3103
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003104Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003106
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003107- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003108 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3109 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3110 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3111 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003112 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3113 Jython 2.1.
3114
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003115- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003116 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003117 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3118 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3119 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3120 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3121 these, see PEP 302.
3122
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003123- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3124 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3125 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3126
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003127- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3128 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3129 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3130
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003131- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3132 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3133 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3134
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003135- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3136 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3137 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3138 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3139 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3140 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3141 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3142 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3143 releases or implementations.
3144
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003145- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003146 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3147 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003148
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003149- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3150 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3151
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003152- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3153 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3154 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3155
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003156- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3157 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3158
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003159- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3160 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003161 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3162 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003163
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003164- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3165 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3166 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3167 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3168 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3169
3170 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3171 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3172 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3173 pattern.
3174
3175 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3176 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3177 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3178 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3179
3180 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3181 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3182 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3183 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3184 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3185 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3186
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003187- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3188 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3189 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3190 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3191 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3192 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3193 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3194 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003195
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003196- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3197 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3198 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3199 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3200 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003201 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3202 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3203 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3204 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3205 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3206 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3207 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003208
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003209- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3210 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3211
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003212- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3213 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3214 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3215 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3216 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3217 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3218 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3219 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3220 to Zack Weinberg!
3221
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003222- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3223 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3224 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3225 type. This has been fixed now.
3226
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003227- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3228 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3229 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3230
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003231- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3232 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3233 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3234 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3235 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3236 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3237 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3238 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003239 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003240
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003241- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3242 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3243 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003244
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003245- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3246 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3247 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3248 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3249 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3250 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3251 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3252 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003253 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003254 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3255 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3256
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003257- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3258 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3259 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3260 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3261 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3262 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3263 this.)
3264
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003265- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3266 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003267 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003268 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003269 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3270 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003271 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3272 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003273
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003274- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3275 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3276 currently running.
3277
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003278- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3279 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3280 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3281 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3282
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003283- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3284 as directory names.
3285
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003286- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3287 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3288
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003289- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3290 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3291
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003292- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003293 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3294 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003295
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003296- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3297 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3298 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3299 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3300 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3301
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003302- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3303 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3304 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3305 removed.
3306
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003307- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3308 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3309 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3310
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003311- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3312 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3313 to __debug__.
3314
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003315- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3316 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3317 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3318
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003319- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3320 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3321 deprecated now.
3322
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003323- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3324 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3325 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003326
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003327- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3328 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3329 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3330 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3331 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003332
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003333- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3334 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3335
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003336- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3337 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3338 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003339 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003340 is backward compatible.
3341
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003342- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3343 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3344 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3345 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3346 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3347
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003348- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3349 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3350 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3351 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3352 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3353 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003354
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003355- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3356 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3357
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003358- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3359 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3360
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003361- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3362 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3363 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3364 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3365 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3366
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003367- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3368 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3369 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3370
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003371- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003372 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3373
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003374- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3375 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3376 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003377
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003378- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3379 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3380
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003381- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3382 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3383 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3384
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003385- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3386
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003387Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003389
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003390- Added three operators to the operator module:
3391 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3392 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3393 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3394
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003395- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3396
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003397- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3398 archives.
3399
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003400- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3401 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3402 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3403
3404 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3405
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003406- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3407 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3408 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003409 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003410
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003411- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3412 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3413 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3414 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003415 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3416 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3417 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3418 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003419
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003420- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3421 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003422
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003423- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3424
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003425- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3426 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3427
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003428- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3429 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3430 supported.
3431
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003432- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3433
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003434- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3435 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003436
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003437- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3438 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3439
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003440- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3441
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003442- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3443 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3444
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003445- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3446 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3447 functions but callable type objects.
3448
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003449- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003450 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003451 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003452
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003453- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3454 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003455
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003456- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3457 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003458
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003459- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3460 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3461 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3462 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3463
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003464- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3465 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003466
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003467- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3468 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3469 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3470 and __imul__.
3471
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003472- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003473 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3474 is called.
3475
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003476- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3477 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3478 interpreter was compiled.
3479
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003480- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3481 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3482 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003483 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003484 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3485 1, not 2.
3486
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003487- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3488 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3489 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3490 limit.
3491
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003492- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3493 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3494 bug #623464.
3495
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003496- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3497 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3498 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3499 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3500
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003501Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003502-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003503
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003504- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3505
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003506- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3507 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3508 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3509 with Python 2.3a2.
3510
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003511- os.path exposes getctime.
3512
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003513- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003514 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003515 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003516 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003517 unit tests of floating point results.
3518
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003519- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3520 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3521 has been increased.
3522
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003523- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3524 executed.
3525
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003526- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3527 postinstallation script.
3528
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003529- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3530 test the current module.
3531
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003532- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003533 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3534 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3535 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3536 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3537
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003538- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003539 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003540 Ward's Optik package.
3541
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003542- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3543 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3544 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3545 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3546
3547- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3548 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003549 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003550
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003551- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3552 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3553 shelf are binary pickles.
3554
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003555- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3556 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3557
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003558- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3559 modules are iterators now.
3560
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003561- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3562 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3563 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3564 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3565 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3566 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003567
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003568- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3569 with their entity value.
3570
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003571- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3572
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003573- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3574 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003575
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003576- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3577 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003578 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003579
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003580- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3581 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3582 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3583 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3584 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3585 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3586 main():
3587
3588 import locale
3589 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3590
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003591- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3592 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3593
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003594- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3595 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3596 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3597 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3598 to the new standard.
3599
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003600- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3601 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3602 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3603 an extension to the database.
3604
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003605- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3606 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3607 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3608 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003609 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003610
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003611- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003612 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003613
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003614- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3615 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3616 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3617 bounded integers.
3618
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003619- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3620 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3621 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3622 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3623 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3624 in existence.
3625
3626 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3627 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3628 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3629 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3630 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3631 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3632
3633 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3634 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3635 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3636 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3637
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003638- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3639 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3640 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3641
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003642- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3643
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003644- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3645 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3646 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3647 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3648
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003649- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3650 argument.
3651
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003652- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3653 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3654 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3655 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3656 [SF patch 560794].
3657
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003658- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3659 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3660 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003661 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3662 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3663 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003664
3665- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3666 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003667
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003668- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3669 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3670 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3671 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003672
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003673- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3674 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3675 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3676 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3677 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3678
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003679- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003680
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003681- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3682
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003683- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3684 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3685 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3686 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3687 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3688 identical to None.
3689
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003690- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3691 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3692 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3693 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3694 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3695 results now.
3696
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003697- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3698 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3699
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003700- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3701 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3702 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3703 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3704 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3705 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3706 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3707 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3708
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003709- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3710
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003711- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3712 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3713
3714- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3715 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3716 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3717 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3718 and other systems.
3719
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003720- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3721 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3722 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3723 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 +00003724 work well with these.
3725
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003726- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3727
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003728- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003729 connections.
3730
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003731- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3732 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3733 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3734
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003735- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3736 sets
3737
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003738- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3739 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3740 name.
3741
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003742- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3743 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3744 passed in.
3745
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003746- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003747 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003748 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3749 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003750
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003751- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3752
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003753- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3754
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003755- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3756 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3757 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3758
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003759- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3760 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3761 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3762 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003763 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003764
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003765- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003766 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003767 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003768
3769- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3770 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3771 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3772
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003773- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003774 the value of its expression argument.
3775
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003776- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3777 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3778 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3779
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003780- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3781 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3782 skipstone browser was included.
3783
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003784- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3785 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3786
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003787Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003789
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003790- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3791 names in addition to accepting file names.
3792
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003793- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3794 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3795 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3796 still used and useful.)
3797
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003798- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3799 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3800 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3801 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003802
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003803- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3804 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3805 the generated binary.
3806
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003807Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003809
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003810- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3811
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003812- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3813 except in the hands of experts.
3814
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003815- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003816 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3817 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3818 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003819
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003820- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3821 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3822 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3823 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3824 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3825 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3826 builds.
3827
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003828- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3829 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3830 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3831 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3832 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3833 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3834 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3835 new type.
3836
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003837- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003838
3839 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3840 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3841 positive infinities.
3842
3843 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3844 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3845 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3846 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3847 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3848 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3849 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3850
3851 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3852
3853 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3854
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003855- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3856 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3857 size of the executable.
3858
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003859- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3860 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3861 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3862 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003863
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003864- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3865
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003866- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3867 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3868 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003869
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003870- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3871 well as Unix.
3872
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003873- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3874 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3875 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3876 modules in the README file for details.
3877
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003878C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003880
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003881- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3882 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003883 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003884 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003885 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003886
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003887- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3888 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3889 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3890 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3891 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3892 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003893 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003894 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3895 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3896 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3897 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3898 aligned.)
3899
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003900- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3901 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3902 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3903
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003904- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3905 level.
3906
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003907- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3908 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3909 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3910 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3911 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3912
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003913- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3914 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3915 code.
3916
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003917- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3918 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3919 adjusting for negative indices.
3920
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003921- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3922 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3923 object.
3924
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003925- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3926 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3927 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3928
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003929- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3930 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003931
3932- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3933
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003934- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3935 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3936 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3937 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3938
3939- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3940
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003941- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003942
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003943- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003944 without going through the buffer API.
3945
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003946- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003947
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003948- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3949 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3950 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3951 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3952
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003953- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3954 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3955
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003956- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003957 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3958
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003959New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003961
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003962- OpenVMS is now supported.
3963
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003964- AtheOS is now supported.
3965
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003966- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3967
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003968- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3969
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003970Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971-----
3972
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003973- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3974 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3975 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003976
3977Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003978-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003979
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003980- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3981 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3982 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3983 bugs.
3984 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003985 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003986 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3987 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003988 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003989
3990- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003991 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003992
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003993- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3994 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3995
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003996- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3997 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003998 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003999 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4000
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004001- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4002 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4003 use files" uninstall option).
4004
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004005- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4006
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004007- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4008 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4009
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004010- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4011 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4012 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4013
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004014- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4015 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4016 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4017 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4018 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004019 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4020 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4021 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004022
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004023- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004024 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004025 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4026 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4027 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4028 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4029 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4030 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4031 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4032 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4033 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4034 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4035 work around.
4036
4037- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4038 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4039 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4040 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4041 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4042 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4043 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4044 specified with O_CREAT too).
4045
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004046Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047----
4048
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004049- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004050
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004051- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4052 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4053 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4054
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004055- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4056 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4057 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4058
4059- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4060 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4061 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4062 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4063 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4064 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4065 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4066 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004067
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004068- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4069 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4070 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004071
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004072- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4073 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4074 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4075 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4076 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004077
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004078- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4079 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4080 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004081
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004082- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4083 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004084
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004085- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4086 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4087 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4088 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4089 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004090
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004091- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4092 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4093 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4094
4095- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4096 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4097 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004098
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004099- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4100 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4101 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4102 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004103 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004104
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004105- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4106 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004107
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004108- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4109 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004110
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004111- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004112 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004113 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4114 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004115
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004116
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004117What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004118===============================
4119
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4121
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004122Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004124
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004125- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4126 with a custom metaclass.
4127
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004128Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004130
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004131- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4132 are proxies.
4133
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004134Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004135-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004136
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004137- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4138 very short strings.
4139
4140- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4141 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4142 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4143 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4144 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4145
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004146Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004148
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004149- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4150 close or delete time).
4151
4152- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4153 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4154
4155- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4156
4157- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004158 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004159
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004160Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004162
4163Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004165
4166C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004168
4169New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004171
4172Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004174
4175Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004177
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004178- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4179
4180- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4181 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4182
4183- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4184 deleted at process exit time.
4185
4186- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4187 in backslash.
4188
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004189Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004190----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004191
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004192- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4193 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4194 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4195
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004196
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004197What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004198===========================
4199
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4201
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004202Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004204
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004205- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4206 been extensively updated. See
4207
4208 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4209
4210 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4211
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004212- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4213 deleted!
4214
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004215- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4216 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4217 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4218 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4219 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4220
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004221- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4222
4223 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4224 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4225
4226 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4227 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4228 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4229 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4230 supported anyway.
4231
4232 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4233 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4234
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004235- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4236 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4237 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4238 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4239 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004240
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004241- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4242 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4243 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4244
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004245Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004247
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004248- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4249 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4250 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4251 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4252 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4253 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004254 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4255 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4256 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4257 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004258
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004259- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4260 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4261 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4262
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004263Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004265
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004266- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4267
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004268Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004270
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004271- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4272 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4273 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4274 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4275 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4276 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4277
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004278- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4279
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004280- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4281
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004282- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4283
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004284- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4285 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4286 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4287
4288- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4289
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004290Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004291-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004292
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004293- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4294 off a search on Google.
4295
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004296Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004298
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004299- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4300 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4301 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4302 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4303 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4304 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4305 other platforms should do likewise.
4306
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004307- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4308 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4309 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4310
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004311C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004312-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004313
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004314- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4315 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4316 producing key-value pairs.
4317
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004318- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004319 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004320 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4321 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4322 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4323 previously went unchallenged.
4324
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004325New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004326-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004327
4328Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004330
4331Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004332-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004333
4334Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004335----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004336
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004337- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4338 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004339
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004340- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4341 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4342 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4343 home.
4344
4345
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004346What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004347===========================
4348
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4350
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004351Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004353
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004354- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4355 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004356
4357 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004358 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004359
4360 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4361 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004362 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004363 This needs to be documented.
4364
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004365- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4366 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4367
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004368- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4369 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4370 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4371
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004372- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4373 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4374
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004375- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4376 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4377 class forbids it).
4378
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004379- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4380 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4381 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4382
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004383- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4384
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004385Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004386-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004387
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004388- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4389 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004390 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004391
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004392- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4393 (like 1 + '').
4394
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004395Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004396-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004397
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004398- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4399 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4400 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4401 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004402 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004403 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4404
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004405- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4406 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4407 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4408 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4409
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004410- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4411 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004412 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4413 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4414 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004415
4416- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4417 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004418
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004419- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4420 bytes on its input.
4421
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004422Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004424
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004425- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004426 convenience function.
4427
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004428- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4429 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4430 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004431 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4432 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4433 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4434 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4435 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4436 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004437
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004438- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4439 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4440 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4441 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4442
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004443- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4444 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4445 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4446
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004447- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4448 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4449 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4450 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4451
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004452- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4453 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004454 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004455 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4456 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4457 new -l and -e options.
4458
4459- statcache is now deprecated.
4460
4461- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4462 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004464 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4465 time properly taken into account.
4466
4467- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4468 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4469 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4470 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4471
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004472Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004474
4475Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004476-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004477
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004478- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4479 is built with libdb3 if available.
4480
4481- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4482
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004483C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004484-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004485
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004486- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4487 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4488 PySequence_Size().
4489
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004490- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4491
4492- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4493 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4494 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4495
4496- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4497 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4498
4499- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4500 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4501
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004502New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004504
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004505- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4506 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4507
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004508- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4509 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4510
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004511- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4512
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004513Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004515
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004516- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4517 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4518
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004519Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004520-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004521
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004522Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004523----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004524
4525- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4526 removed completely in the next release.
4527
4528- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4529 OSX.
4530
4531- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4532 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4533
4534- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4535
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004536
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004537What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004538===========================
4539
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4541
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004542Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004543--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004544
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004545- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004546 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004547 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004548 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4549 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004550 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4551 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004552 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4553 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004554
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004555- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4556 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4557
4558- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4559 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4560
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004561Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004563
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004564- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4565 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4566 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4567 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4568 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4569 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4570 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4571 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4572
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004573- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4574 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4575 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4576 example).
4577
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004578- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004579 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004580 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004581 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004582
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004583- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4584 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4585 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004586 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004587
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004588- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4589 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4590 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4591 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4592 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4593 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4594
4595 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4596
4597 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4598
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004599Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004600-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004601
4602- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4603
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004604- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4605
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004606- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4607 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004608
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004609- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4610 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4611 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4612 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4613 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4614 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004615 attributes.
4616
4617- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4618 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4619 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004620
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004621- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4622 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4623 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004624
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004625- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4626 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4627 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004628 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4629 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4630
4631- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4632 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004633
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004634Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004636
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004637- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4638 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4639
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004640- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4641 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4642 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4643 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4644
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004645- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4646 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4647 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4648 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4649
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004650 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4651 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4652 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4653 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4654 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4655 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4656 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4657 without losing information).
4658
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004659- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004660 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4661 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4662 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4663 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4664 module).
4665
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004666 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004667 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4668 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4669 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4670 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004671
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004672- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004673 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4674 encoding.
4675
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004676- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4677 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4678
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004679- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004680 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4681
4682- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4683 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4684 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4685 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4686
4687- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4688
4689- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4690 ON, and OFF.
4691
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004692- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4693 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4694
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004695Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004697
4698- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4699 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4700 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004701
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004702- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4703 been added: -X and -E.
4704
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004705Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004707
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004708- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4709 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4710
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004711C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004712-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004713
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004714- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4715 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4716 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4717 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4718 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4719
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004720- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4721 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4722 as long) arguments.
4723
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004724- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4725 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4726 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4727 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4728 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4729 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4730
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004731- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4732 input.
4733
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004734New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004736
4737Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004738-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004739
4740Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004742
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004743- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4744 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4745 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4746
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004747- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4748 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4749 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004750 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004751
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4753 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4754 import signal
4755 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004756
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004758 while 1:
4759 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004760 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004761 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4762 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4763 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4764 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004765
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004766
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004767What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4768===========================
4769
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004770*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4771
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004772Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004773--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004774
4775- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4776 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4777 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4778
4779- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4780 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4781 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4782 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4783 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4784 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4785 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004786
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004787- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004788 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004789 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4790 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4791 associate a docstring with a property.
4792
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004793- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4794 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4795 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4796 other built-in object types.
4797
4798- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4799 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4800 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4801 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4802 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4803
4804- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4805 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4806
4807- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4808 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004809 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004810 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4811 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4812 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4813 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4814 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4815
4816- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4817 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4818 class.
4819
4820- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4821 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4822 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4823 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4824
4825- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4826 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4827 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4828 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4829
4830- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4831 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4832
4833- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4834 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4835 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4836 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4837 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004838 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004839 with the same value as s.
4840
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004841- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4842
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004843Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004845
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004846- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4847
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004848- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4849 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4850 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4851 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4852 objects.
4853
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004854- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4855 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004856 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4857 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4858
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004859- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4860 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4861 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4862
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004863Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004864-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004865
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004866- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4867 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4868 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4869 by the instances.
4870
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004871- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4872 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4873 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4874
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004875- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4876 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4877 before the entire comparison is complete.
4878
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004879- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4880 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4881 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4882
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004883- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4884 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4885 getwriter().
4886
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004887- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4888 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4889
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004890- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004891 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4892 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4893
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004894- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4895 iterable object.
4896
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004897- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4898 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004899
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004900- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4901 authentication.
4902
4903- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4904 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004905
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004906- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004907 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4908 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4909 a sample driver.)
4910
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004911Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004912-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004913
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004914- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4915 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4916 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4917 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4918 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4919 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4920 kernel has large file support.
4921
4922- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4923 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4924 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4925 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4926 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4927
4928- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4929 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4930 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4931
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004932C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004933-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004934
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004935- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4936 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4937
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004938New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004939-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004940
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004941- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4942 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4943
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004944Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004945-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004946
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004947- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4948 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4949 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4950 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4951 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4952
4953- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4954 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4955 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4956 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4957
4958- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4959 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4960
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004961Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004962-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004963
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004964- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004965 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4966 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004967
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004968
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004969What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4970===========================
4971
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004972*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4973
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004974Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004975----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004976
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004977- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4978 big to represent as a C double.
4979
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004980- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4981 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4982 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4983 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4984 restriction).
4985
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004986- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4987 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4988 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4989 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4990 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4991
4992 >>> dir([])
4993 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4994 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4995 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4996 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4997 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4998 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4999 'reverse', 'sort']
5000
5001 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5002
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005003- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005004 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5005 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5006 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5007 OverflowError exception.
5008
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005009- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005010 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005011 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5012 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5013 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5014 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5015 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005016 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005017 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5018 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5019
5020 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5021 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5022 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5023 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005024
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005025- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005026 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5027 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5028 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5029 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5030 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5031 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5032 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5033 once it is created.
5034
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005035- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5036 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5037 (key, value) pairs.
5038
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005039- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005040 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5041 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5042
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005043- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5044 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5045 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5046 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5047 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005048
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005049- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005050 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5051 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5052
5053 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5054
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005055- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005056 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5057
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005058Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005060
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005061- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005062 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5063 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005064
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005065- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5066 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5067 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5068 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5069 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5070 in this area anymore).
5071
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005072- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5073 threading.Timer.
5074
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005075- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5076 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5077
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005078- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005079 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5080
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005081- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005082 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5083 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5084 converted to Python longs.
5085
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005086- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005087 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5088
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005089- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5090 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5091 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5092
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005093Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005094-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005095
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005096- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5097 division operators as per PEP 238.
5098
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005099Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005100-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005101
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005102- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5103 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5104 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5105 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5106
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005107C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005108-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005109
5110- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005111
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005112- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5113 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005114 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005115
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005116 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5117 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005118 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005119 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005120
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005121- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005122 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5123 module:
5124
5125 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005126
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005127 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5128 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005129
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005130 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5131 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005132
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005133 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5134
5135 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5136
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005137- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005138 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5139 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5140 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005141
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005142New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005144
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005145- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5146 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5147 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5148 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5149 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005150
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005151Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005153
5154Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005155-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005156
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005157- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5158 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5159 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5160 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005161 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5162 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5163 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5164 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5165 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005166
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005167- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005168 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5169
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005170
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005171What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5172===========================
5173
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005174*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5175
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005176Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005177-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005178
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005179- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5180 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5181
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005182- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5183 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5184 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005185
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005186- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5187 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5188 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5189 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005190
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005191- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5192
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005194
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005195Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005196-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005197
5198- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005199 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005200 the module docstring for details.
5201
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005202Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005203-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005204
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005205- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005206 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5207 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5208 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005209
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005210- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5211 Nick Mathewson.
5212
5213Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005215
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005216- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5217 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5218 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5219 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5220 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5221 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5222 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5223 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5224
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005225- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5226 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5227 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5228 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5229
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005230- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5231 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5232 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5233 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5234 come a long way).
5235
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005236- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5237 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5238 write filters for these warnings).
5239
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005240- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5241 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5242 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5243 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5244 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5245
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005246- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5247 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5248 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5249 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5250 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5251 older distribution.
5252
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005253Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005254-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005255
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005256- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5257 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005258 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005259
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005260- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5261 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5262 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5263
5264- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5265
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005266- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5267
5268- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5269
5270- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5271
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005272- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005273
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005274- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5275
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005276New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005277-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005278
5279C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005281
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005282- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5283 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5284 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5285 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5286 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5287 against buffer overruns.
5288
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005289- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005290 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5291 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005292 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5293 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5294 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5295
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005296- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5297 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5298 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5299 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5300 deprecated.
5301
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005302Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005304
5305- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5306 relevant is found.
5307
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005308
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005309What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005310===========================
5311
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005312*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5313
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005314Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005315----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005316
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005317- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5318 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5319 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5320 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5321 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5322 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5323 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5324 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005325 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005326 repaired.
5327
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005328- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005329 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005330 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5331 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5332 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5333 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5334 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5335 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5336 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5337 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5338
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005339- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5340 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5341 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5342 leading BMO character).
5343
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005344- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5345 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5346 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5347
5348 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5349 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5350 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005351
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005352 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5353 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5354 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5355 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5356 for various simple to use conversions.
5357
5358 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5359 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5360
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005361 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5362 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5363 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5364 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5365 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5366 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5367 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5368 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5369 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5370 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5371 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5372 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5373 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5374 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5375 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005376
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005377- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5378 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5379 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005380 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005381 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005382
5383 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005384 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5385 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5386 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5387 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5388 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005389 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5390 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005391
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005392 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5393 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5394 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005395 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005396
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005397- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5398 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5399 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5400 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5401 floating arithmetic,
5402
5403 x = 9007199254740992.0
5404 print long(x)
5405
5406 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5407 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5408 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5409 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5410 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5411 functions are of good quality).
5412
5413 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5414 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5415 algorithms to break.
5416
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005417- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5418 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5419 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5420 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5421 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5422 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5423 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5424 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5425 order.
5426
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005427- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5428 operation along the most common code paths.
5429
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005430- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5431 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5432
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005433- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5434 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5435 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5436 {}.update(UserDict())
5437
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005438- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5439 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5440 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5441 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5442 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5443 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5444 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5445 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5446
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005447- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005448 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005449
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005450 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005451 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5452 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005453 join() method of strings
5454 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005455 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5456 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005457 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005458 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005459
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005460- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5461 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5462
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005463- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5464 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5465
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005466- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5467 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5468 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5469 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5470
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005471- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5472 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005473 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005474 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5475 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005476
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005477- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5478
5479
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005480Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005481-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005482
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005483- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005484 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005485 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5486 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5487
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005488- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5489 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5490
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005491- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5492 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5493 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5494 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5495
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005496- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5497 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5498 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5499
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005500- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5501
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005502- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5503
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005504- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5505 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5506 that are still imported into string.py).
5507
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005508- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5509
5510- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5511 Now it does.
5512
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005513- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5514
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005515- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5516 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5517 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5518 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5519 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005520 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5521 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005522
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005523- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5524 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5525 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5526 'help(object)'.
5527
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005528Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005529-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005530
5531- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005532 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005533 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5534 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5535
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005536- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005537 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5538 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005539
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005540C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005541-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005542
5543- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5544 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005545
5546----
5547
5548**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**