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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +000015- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
16 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
17 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
18 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
19
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000020- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
21 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
22
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000023- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
24 constant.
25
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000026- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
27 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
28 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
29 large), and to anomalies such as
30 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
31 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
32 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
33 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000034
35Extension modules
36-----------------
37
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +000038- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
39 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000040 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
41 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
42 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000043
44Library
45-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000046
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +000047- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
48 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
49 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
50 Closes bug #1039270.
51
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000052- Updates for the email package:
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +000053 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +000054 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
55 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
56 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
57 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
58 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
59 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
60 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
61 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
62 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
63 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
64 + Updates to documentation.
65
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +000066- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
67 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
68 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
69 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
70
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000071- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000072
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000073- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
74 applications should use the getmember function.
75
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000076- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
77
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000078- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
79 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
80 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
81 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
82 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
83 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
84 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
85 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
86 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
87
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000088- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
89 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000090 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000091
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000092- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
93 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
94 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
95 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
96 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
97 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
98 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
99 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000100
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000101- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
102 the new public features (of which there are many).
103
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000104- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000105 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
106 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
107 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
108 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000109 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000110
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000111- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
112
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000113- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
114 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
115 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
116 options.
117
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000118- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
119 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
120 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
121 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
122 conditions under which non-string values work.
123
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000124Build
125-----
126
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000127- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
128 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
129 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
130
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000131- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
132 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
133 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
134 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
135 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000136
137C API
138-----
139
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000140- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
141 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
142
143- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
144
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000145- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
146 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
147 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
148 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
149 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
150 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
151 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
152 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
153 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
154
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000155- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
156
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000157- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
158 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
159 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000160
161Documentation
162-------------
163
164...
165
166Tests
167-----
168
169- test__locale ported to unittest
170
171Windows
172-------
173
174...
175
176Mac
177---
178
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000179- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
180 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
181 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000182
183New platforms
184-------------
185
186...
187
188Tools/Demos
189-----------
190
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000191- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
192 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
193 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
194 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
195 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000196
197
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000198What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
199=================================
200
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000201*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000202
203Core and builtins
204-----------------
205
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000206- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000207 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
208
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000209- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
210 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
211 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
212 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
213 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
214 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
215 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
216 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000217 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
218 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
219 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
220 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
221 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000222
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000223- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
224 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
225 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
226 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
227 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
228
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000229- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
230
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000231- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
232 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
233
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000234- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
235 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
236 modified the list.
237
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000238- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
239 functions is now writable.
240
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000241- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
242 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
243 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
244 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
245
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000246- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
247 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
248 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
249 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
250 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000251
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000252- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
253 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
254
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000255Extension modules
256-----------------
257
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000258- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
259
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000260- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
261 data.
262
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000263- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
264 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
265 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
266 supposed to have been truncated away.
267
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000268- Added socket.socketpair().
269
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000270- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
271 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
272
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000273- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000274 versions of Python, have now been removed.
275
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000276Library
277-------
278
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000279- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000280 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000281
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000282- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
283 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
284
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000285- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
286 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
287
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000288- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
289
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000290- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
291 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000292
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000293- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
294 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
295
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000296- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
297
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000298- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
299
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000300- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
301
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000302- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
303 Percivall.
304
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000305- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
306 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
307
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000308- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
309 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
310 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000311 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000312
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000313- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
314 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
315 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
316 and exponent.
317
318- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
319
320- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
321 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
322 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
323
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000324- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
325 to the readline module.
326
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000327- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000328 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
329 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000330
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000331- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
332 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
333 contains symlinks.
334
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000335- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
336 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
337
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000338- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
339 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
340 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
341
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000342- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
343 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
344 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
345 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
346 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
347 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
348 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
349 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
350 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
351 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
352 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
353 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
354 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
355
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000356- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
357
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000358Tools/Demos
359-----------
360
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000361- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
362 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
363
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000364- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
365
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000366Build
367-----
368
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000369- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
370 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
371 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
372 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
373 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
374 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
375 plans to do so.
376
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000377- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
378 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
379
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000380- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
381 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
382
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000383- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
384 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
385
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000386- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
387 GNU/k*BSD systems.
388
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000389- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
390 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
391
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000392C API
393-----
394
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000395..
396
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000397Documentation
398-------------
399
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000400- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
401 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
402
403- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
404 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
405 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000406
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000407New platforms
408-------------
409
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000410- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
411
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000412Tests
413-----
414
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000415..
416
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000417Windows
418-------
419
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000420- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
421 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
422 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
423 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
424 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
425 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
426 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
427 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
428 the problem.
429
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000430Mac
431---
432
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000433..
434
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000435
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000436What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
437=================================
438
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000439*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000440
441Core and builtins
442-----------------
443
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000444- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
445 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
446 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
447 sensitive code.
448
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000449- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000450 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000451
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000452 @staticmethod
453 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000454
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000455 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000456
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000457- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
458 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
459 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
460 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
461 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
462 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
463 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
464 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
465 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
466 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
467 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
468
469 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
470 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
471 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
472 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
473 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
474 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
475 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
476
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000477- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
478 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
479
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000480- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000481 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000482
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000483- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000484 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000485 which was missing for no apparent reason.
486
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000487- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000488 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
489 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
490
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000491- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
492 types that support garbage collection.
493
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000494- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
495
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000496- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
497 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
498 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
499 Jython.
500
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000501- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
502
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000503- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
504 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
505
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000506- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
507 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
508 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000509
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000510- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
511 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
512 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
513
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000514Extension modules
515-----------------
516
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000517- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
518
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000519Library
520-------
521
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000522- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
523 TIS-620
524
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000525- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
526 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
527 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
528 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
529 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
530 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
531 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
532 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
533 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
534 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
535
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000536- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
537
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000538- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
539 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
540 same as when the argument is omitted).
541 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
542
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000543- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
544
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000545- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
546 schemes are offered.
547
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000548- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
549
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000550- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
551 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
552 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
553
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000554- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
555
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000556- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
557 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
558
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000559- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
560 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
561 when dummy_threading is being used.
562
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000563- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
564 from a tarfile.
565
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000566- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000567 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000568
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000569- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
570 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
571 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
572 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
573
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000574- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
575 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
576
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000577- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
578 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
579 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
580 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
581 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
582 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
583 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
584 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
585 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
586 by some other method in progress).
587
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000588- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
589 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
590 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000591
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000592- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
593
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000594- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
595 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
596 AM Kuchling.
597
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000598- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
599 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
600 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
601
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000602- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
603 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
604 instead of unsigned.
605
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000606- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000607 no longer part of the public API.
608
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000609- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
610 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
611 string methods of the same name).
612
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000613- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000614 SF patch 945642.
615
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000616- doctest unittest integration improvements:
617
618 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
619
620 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
621 DocTestSuites.
622
623- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
624 that provide thread-local data.
625
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000626- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
627 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
628
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000629- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
630
631- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
632 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
633 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
634
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000635- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
636
637 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
638 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
639 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000640
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000641 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
642 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
643 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
644 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
645
646 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
647 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
648
649 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
650 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
651 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
652 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
653
654 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
655 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
656 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
657 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
658 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
659
660 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
661 wrapping help output.
662
663 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
664 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
665 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000666
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000667C API
668-----
669
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000670- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
671 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
672 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
673 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
674 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
675 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
676 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
677 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
678 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
679 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
680 its visible semantics have not changed.
681
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000682- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
683 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
684
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000685Documentation
686-------------
687
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000688- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000689
690 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000691 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000692
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000693 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000694
695 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
696
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000697- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000698
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000699Tests
700-----
701
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000702- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000703 platforms that use the Makefile.
704
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000705- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
706 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
707 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
708
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000709
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000710What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
711=================================
712
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000713*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000714
715Core and builtins
716-----------------
717
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000718- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
719 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
720 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
721 objects now (one object instead of three).
722
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000723- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
724 Windows DLLs.
725
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000726- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
727 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000728
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000729- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
730 a new .pyc magic.
731
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000732- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
733 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
734 be there.
735
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000736- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
737 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
738 the LC_NUMERIC category.
739
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000740- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
741 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
742 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
743
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000744- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
745
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000746- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
747 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
748 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000749
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000750- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
751 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
752
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000753- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
754
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000755- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000756 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000757
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000758- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
759
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000760- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
761
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000762- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
763 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
764
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000765- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
766 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
767 Fixes bug #858016 .
768
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000769- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
770 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
771 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
772
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000773- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
774 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
775 improves their performance (about 35%).
776
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000777- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
778 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
779 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
780
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000781- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
782 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
783 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
784 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
785
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000786- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
787 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
788 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
789 length is not known).
790
791- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
792 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000793 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
794 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000795 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
796
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000797- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
798 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
799
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000800- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
801 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
802 keyword arguments.
803
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000804- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
805 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
806 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
807
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000808- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
809 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
810 cases.
811
812- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
813 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
814 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
815 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
816 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
817 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
818 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
819 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
820 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
821 a release build.
822
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000823- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
824 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
825
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000826- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000827 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000828
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000829- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
830 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
831 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
832 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
833 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
834 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
835 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
836 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
837 destroyed.
838
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000839- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
840 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
841 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
842 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
843 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
844 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
845 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
846 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
847
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000848- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
849 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
850 character other than a space.
851
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000852- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
853 by the function object or by the method object, the function
854 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
855 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
856 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
857 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
858 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
859 attributes with the same name.
860
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000861- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
862 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
863 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
864 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
865 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
866 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
867 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
868 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
869 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
870 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
871 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
872 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
873 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
874 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000875
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000876- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
877 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
878 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
879 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
880 This has been repaired.
881
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000882- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
883
884- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
885
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000886- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
887 over a sequence.
888
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000889- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000890 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000891
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000892- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
893
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000894- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
895 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
896 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
897 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
898 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
899 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
900 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
901 records with equal keys is unchanged).
902
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000903- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
904 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
905 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
906
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000907- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
908 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
909 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
910 freelist.
911
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000912- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
913 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
914
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000915- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
916 number.
917
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000918- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
919 a TypeError exception.
920
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000921- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
922 820195.
923
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000924- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
925 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
926 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
927
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000928- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000929 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
930 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000931
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000932- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
933 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
934 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
935
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000936- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
937 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000938 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000939
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000940- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000941 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
942 the first call.
943
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000944
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000945Extension modules
946-----------------
947
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000948- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
949 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
950
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000951- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
952 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
953 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
954 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
955 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
956 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
957 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000958
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000959- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
960
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000961- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
962
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000963- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
964 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
965
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000966- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
967 fewer false positives.
968
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000969- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
970 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
971
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000972- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000973 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
974
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000975- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000976 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000977 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000978 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
979 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000980
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000981- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
982 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
983 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
984 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
985
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000986- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
987 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
988 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
989 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
990 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
991 #897625.
992
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000993- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
994 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
995
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000996- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
997 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
998 and pops on either side of the deque.
999
1000- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1001 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1002
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001003- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1004 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1005 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1006 other functions that expect a function argument.
1007
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001008- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1009
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001010- os.getsid was added.
1011
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001012- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1013 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1014 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1015
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001016- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1017
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001018- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1019
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001020- readline.clear_history was added.
1021
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001022- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1023
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001024- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1025
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001026- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1027
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001028- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1029
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001030- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1031
1032- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1033
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001034- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1035
1036- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1037
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001038- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1039 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1040 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1041
1042- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1043 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1044 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1045 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1046 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1047 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1048 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1049
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001050- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1051 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1052 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1053 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001054
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001055- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001056 iterators from a single iterable.
1057
1058- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1059 of raising a TypeError exception.
1060
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001061- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1062 as parameter.
1063
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001064Library
1065-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001066
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001067- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1068 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1069 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001070
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001071- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1072 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1073 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001074
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001075- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001076
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001077- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1078 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001079
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001080- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1081 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1082
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001083- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1084
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001085- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001086 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001087
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001088- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001089 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001090
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001091- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1092
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001093- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1094 on cygwin and mingw32.
1095
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001096- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1097
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001098- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1099 module.
1100
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001101- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1102 installation scheme for all platforms.
1103
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001104- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001105 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001106
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001107- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1108 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1109 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1110
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001111- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1112 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1113 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1114
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001115- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1116
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001117- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1118
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001119- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1120 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1121
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001122- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1123 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1124 type pattern with the same value exists.
1125
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001126- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1127 when run from the command prompt).
1128
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001129- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1130 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1131
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001132- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1133 default sort).
1134
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001135- Added global runctx function to profile module
1136
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001137- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1138
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001139- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1140
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001141- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1142
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001143- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001144 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1145 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1146 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1147 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1148 accordingly.
1149
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001150- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1151 decoding standards.
1152
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001153- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1154 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1155 called for all requests.
1156
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001157- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1158 they are passed to the compiler.
1159
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001160- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1161 indent, width and depth.
1162
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001163- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1164 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1165
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001166- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1167 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1168
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001169- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1170
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001171- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1172
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001173- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1174
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001175- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1176 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1177
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001178- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001179 for better performance.
1180
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001181- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001182
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001183- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1184 a string).
1185
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001186- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1187
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001188- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1189
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001190- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1191
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001192- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1193
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001194- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1195 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1196 list of fieldnames.
1197
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001198- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1199 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1200
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001201- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1202
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001203- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1204 empty lists.
1205
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001206- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1207 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1208 and shelves.
1209
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001210- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1211 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1212
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001213- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001214 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1215 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001216
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001217- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1218 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001219 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001220
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001221- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001222 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1223 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1224
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001225- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1226 and removed in Py2.4.
1227
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001228- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1229
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001230- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1231
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001232Tools/Demos
1233-----------
1234
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001235- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1236 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1237
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001238- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1239
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001240- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1241 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1242 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1243 destination in situations where both files are given.
1244
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001245- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1246 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1247 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1248 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1249
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001250- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1251
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001252- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1253 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1254 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1255 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1256 now.
1257
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001258- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1259 in effect
1260
1261- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1262 C-c C-h
1263
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001264- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1265 -d option was given.
1266
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001267Build
1268-----
1269
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001270- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1271 build under OS X.
1272
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001273- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1274 --enable-profiling.
1275
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001276- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1277 is configured --with-tsc.
1278
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001279- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1280 on AMD64.
1281
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001282- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1283 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1284
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001285- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1286 removed.
1287
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001288- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1289 supported (see PEP 11).
1290
1291- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1292
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001293- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1294
1295- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1296 (see PEP 11).
1297
1298- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1299 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1300
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001301C API
1302-----
1303
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001304- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1305 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1306 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1307
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001308- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1309 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1310 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1311 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1312
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001313- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1314 generator objects.
1315
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001316- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1317 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001318 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1319 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001320
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001321- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1322 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1323
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001324- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1325 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1326 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1327 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1328 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1329
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001330- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1331 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1332 about 10% faster.
1333
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001334- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1335 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1336
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001337- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1338 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1339 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1340 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1341
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001342Windows
1343-------
1344
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001345- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1346 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1347 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1348 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1349
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001350- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1351 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1352 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1353
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001354
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001355What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1356===============================
1357
1358*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1359
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001360IDLE
1361----
1362
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001363- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1364 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1365 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1366 context-menu actions.
1367
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001368- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1369 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1370 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1371 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1372 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1373 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1374 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1375 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1376 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1377
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001378
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001379What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1380=============================================
1381
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001382*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001383
1384Core and builtins
1385-----------------
1386
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001387- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001388 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001389 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1390
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001391Extension modules
1392-----------------
1393
1394- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1395 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1396 than once. This has been fixed.
1397
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001398- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1399 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1400 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1401 call.
1402
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001403- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1404
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001405Library
1406-------
1407
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001408- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1409 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1410
1411- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1412 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1413 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1414 restored.
1415
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001416IDLE
1417----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001418
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001419- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001420
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001421Build
1422-----
1423
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001424- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1425 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1426
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001427C API
1428-----
1429
1430Windows
1431-------
1432
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001433- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1434 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1435
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001436- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1437
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001438Mac
1439---
1440
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001441- Various fixes to pimp.
1442
1443- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1444
1445- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1446 more problems than it solves.
1447
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001448
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001449What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1450=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001451
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001452*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1453
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001454Core and builtins
1455-----------------
1456
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001457- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1458 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1459
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001460- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1461 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001462 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001463
1464- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1465 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1466 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001467 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001468
1469- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1470 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001471
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001472- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1473 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1474 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1475
1476- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001477 770247.
1478
1479- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001480
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001481Extension modules
1482-----------------
1483
1484- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1485 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1486
1487- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1488
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001489- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1490
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001491- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1492 contained within the _strptime module.
1493
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001494- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1495 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1496
1497- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001498 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1499
1500- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1501 the find_class attribute, if present.
1502
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001503- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001504
1505 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1506 (SF bug 763298).
1507
1508 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001509 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1510 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1511 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001512
1513 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1514
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001515Library
1516-------
1517
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001518- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1519
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001520- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1521 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1522 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1523 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1524 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1525 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1526 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1527 or Tester().
1528
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001529- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1530 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1531 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1532 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1533 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1534 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1535 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1536 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1537 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001538
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001539 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001540
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001541- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1542 weren't before was an oversight.
1543
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001544- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1545 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1546
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001547- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1548 when there are no lines.
1549
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001550- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1551 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1552
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001553- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1554 to child processes.
1555
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001556- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1557
1558- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1559
1560- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1561 xmlrpclib.
1562
1563- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1564 responses.
1565
1566- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1567 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1568
1569- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1570 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1571 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1572
1573- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1574 used as patterns.
1575
1576- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1577 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1578 than Tk 8.3.
1579
1580- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1581
1582- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001583
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001584Tools/Demos
1585-----------
1586
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001587- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1588
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001589- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1590
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001591- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001592
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001593Build
1594-----
1595
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001596- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1597
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001598- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1599
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001600- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1601 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001602
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001603- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1604 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1605 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001606
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001607C API
1608-----
1609
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001610- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1611 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1612
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001613Windows
1614-------
1615
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001616- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1617 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1618 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1619 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1620 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1621 Python exception ::
1622
1623 thread.error: can't start new thread
1624
1625 is raised now.
1626
1627- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1628 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1629 instead of from DLL teardown.
1630
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001631Mac
1632---
1633
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001634- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001635 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001636 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1637 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1638 the executable in the bundle.
1639
1640- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001641
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001642- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1643
1644- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1645 on Panther.
1646
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001647What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1648================================
1649
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001650*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001651
1652Core and builtins
1653-----------------
1654
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001655- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1656 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1657 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1658 with the -i option.
1659
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001660- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1661 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1662
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001663- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1664 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1665
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001666- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1667 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1668 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1669 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1670 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1671 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1672 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1673 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1674 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1675 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1676 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1677 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1678 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001679
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001680- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1681 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1682 embedded in a lambda expression.
1683
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001684- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1685 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1686 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1687 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1688 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1689
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001690- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1691 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1692 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1693
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001694- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1695 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1696
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001697- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1698 It's writable again.
1699
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001700- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1701 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1702 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001703 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001704
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001705- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1706 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1707 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1708
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001709Extension modules
1710-----------------
1711
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001712- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1713 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1714
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001715- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1716 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1717 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1718 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1719
1720- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1721 collection.
1722
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001723- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1724 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1725 unique within a single program run.
1726
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001727- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1728 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1729
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001730- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1731 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1732
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001733- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1734 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001735
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001736- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1737
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001738- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1739 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1740
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001741- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1742 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1743 for many BSD-derived systems.
1744
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001745
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001746Library
1747-------
1748
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001749- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1750 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1751 primary ones:
1752
1753 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1754 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1755 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1756
1757 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1758 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1759 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1760 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1761 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1762 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1763
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001764- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1765 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1766 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1767 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1768 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1769 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1770 argument.
1771
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001772- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1773 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1774 in the archive.
1775
1776- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1777 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1778
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001779- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1780 569574).
1781
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001782- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1783 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1784 no more.
1785
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001786- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1787 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1788 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1789 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1790 code coverage.
1791
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001792- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1793 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1794 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001795 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1796 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001797
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001798- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1799 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1800 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001801 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001802
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001803- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1804
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001805- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1806 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1807 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1808 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1809
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001810- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1811 handling.
1812
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001813- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1814 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1815
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001816- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1817 in socket.py.
1818
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001819- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1820
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001821- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1822 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1823 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1824 opener with proxy support.
1825
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001826- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1827
1828- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1829
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001830Tools/Demos
1831-----------
1832
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001833- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1834
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001835- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1836
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001837- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1838 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001839
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001840- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1841 files.
1842
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001843Build
1844-----
1845
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001846- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001847 different root directory.
1848
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001849C API
1850-----
1851
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001852- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1853 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1854 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1855 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1856 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1857 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1858 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1859 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1860 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1861 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1862
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001863- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1864 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1865 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1866 from Python.
1867
1868
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001869New platforms
1870-------------
1871
1872None this time.
1873
1874Tests
1875-----
1876
1877- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1878 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1879
1880Windows
1881-------
1882
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001883- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1884
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001885- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1886 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1887 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1888 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1889 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1890 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1891 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1892 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1893 that's what it's for.
1894
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001895Mac
1896---
1897
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001898- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1899 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1900 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1901 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001902- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1903 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1904- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001905
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001906SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1907------------------------------------
1908
1909430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1910598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1911622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1912661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1913683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1914697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1915713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1916724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1917727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1918729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1919730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1920731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1921732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1922733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1923735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1924740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1925744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1926745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1927747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1928749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1929751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1930753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1931755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1932757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1933760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1934
1935
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001936What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1937================================
1938
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001939*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001940
1941Core and builtins
1942-----------------
1943
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001944- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1945 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1946
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001947- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1948 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1949 and cannot be strings).
1950
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001951- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1952 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1953 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1954 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1955
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001956- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1957 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1958 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1959 Python itself.
1960
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001961- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1962 the referenced object, if it has one.
1963
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001964- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1965 the thread started at
1966 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1967
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001968- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1969 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1970 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1971 placed on a list index.
1972
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001973- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1974 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1975 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1976 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1977
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001978- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1979 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1980 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1981 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1982 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1983 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1984 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1985
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001986- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1987 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1988 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1989 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1990 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1991
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001992- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1993 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001994
1995- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1996 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1997 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1998 #693195.)
1999
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002000- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2001 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002002
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002003- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002004 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002005 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2006 interpreter executions, would fail.
2007
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002008- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002009 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002010 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002011
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002012Extension modules
2013-----------------
2014
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002015- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2016 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2017 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2018 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2019
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002020- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2021 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2022
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002023- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2024 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2025 and Greg Chapman.)
2026
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002027- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2028 recursively.
2029
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002030- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002031 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2032 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2033 leaks.
2034
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002035- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2036
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002037- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2038 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2039 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2040 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2041 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2042 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2043 #705836.
2044
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002045- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002046 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2047
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002048- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2049 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2050 See SF bug #692416.
2051
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002052- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2053 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2054
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002055- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2056 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2057 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002058
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002059- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002060 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2061 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2062
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002063- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2064 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2065 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2066 timeouts to work properly.
2067
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002068Library
2069-------
2070
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002071- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2072 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2073 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2074 future release.
2075
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002076- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2077 for querying platform dependent features.
2078
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002079- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002080
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002081- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2082 pickle protocol versions.
2083
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002084- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2085 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2086 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2087
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002088- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2089
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002090- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2091 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2092 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2093 modules.
2094
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002095- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2096 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2097 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2098
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002099- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2100 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2101
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002102- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2103 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2104 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2105
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002106- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002107 MS Office extensions.
2108
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002109- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2110 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2111
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002112- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2113 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2114
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002115- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2116 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2117 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2118 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2119 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2120 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2121
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002122- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2123 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2124 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002125
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002126- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2127 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2128 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2129
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002130- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2131
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002132- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2133 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2134 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2135
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002136Tools/Demos
2137-----------
2138
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002139- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2140 See the module docstring for details.
2141
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002142Build
2143-----
2144
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002145- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2146 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002147
2148C API
2149-----
2150
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002151- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2152
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002153- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2154 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2155 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2156
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002157- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2158 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002159
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002160 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2161 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2162 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002163
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002164- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002165 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2166
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002167- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2168 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2169 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002170
2171New platforms
2172-------------
2173
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002174None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002175
2176Tests
2177-----
2178
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002179- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2180 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002181
2182Windows
2183-------
2184
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002185- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2186 function.
2187
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002188- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2189 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002190
2191Mac
2192---
2193
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002194- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2195 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002196
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002197- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2198 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002199
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002200- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2201 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2202 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002203
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002204- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002205 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2206 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002207
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002208- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2209 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002210
2211
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002212What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2213=================================
2214
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002215*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002216
2217Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002218-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002219
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002220- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2221 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2222 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2223
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002224- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2225 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2226 (SF patch #664376.)
2227
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002228- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2229 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2230 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2231 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2232 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2233 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002234 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002235
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002236- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2237 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2238 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2239 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002240 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002241
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002242- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2243 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2244 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2245 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2246 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2247 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2248 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2249 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2250 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2251 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2252 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2253
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002254- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2255 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2256 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2257 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2258 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2259 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2260
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002261- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2262 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2263
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002264- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2265 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2266 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2267 case.)
2268
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002269- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2270 passed as unicode strings.
2271
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002272- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2273 See SF bug #683467.
2274
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002275- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2276 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2277
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002278- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2279
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002280- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2281
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002282- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2283 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2284 arguments.
2285
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002286- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2287 See SF bug #667147.
2288
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002289- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002290 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002291 See SF bug #676155.
2292
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002293- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002294 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002295 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2296 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2297 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2298 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2299 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2300 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002301
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002302Extension modules
2303-----------------
2304
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002305- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2306 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2307 tp_as_number pointer.
2308
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002309- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2310 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2311 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2312 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2313 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2314
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002315- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2316
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002317- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2318
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002319- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002320 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002321 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2322 patch #678531.)
2323
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002324- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2325 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2326
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002327- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2328 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2329
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002330- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2331
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002332- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2333 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2334 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2335
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002336- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2337
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002338- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2339 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2340
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002341- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002342
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002343- datetime changes:
2344
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002345 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2346
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002347 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2348 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2349 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2350 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2351 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2352 now.
2353
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002354 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002355 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2356 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002357
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002358 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002359 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002360 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2361 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2362 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2363 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002364
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002365 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2366 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2367 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002368 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2369
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002370 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2371 by a later example coded by Guido.
2372
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002373 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002374 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2375 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2376 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002377 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2378 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2379
2380 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2381 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2382 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2383 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2384 tzinfo subclass instance.
2385
2386 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2387 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2388 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2389 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2390 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2391 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2392 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2393 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002394
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002395 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2396 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2397 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2398 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2399 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002400 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2401
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002402 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002403
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002404 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2405 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2406 as a naive datetime object.
2407
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002408 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2409 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2410 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2411
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002412 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2413 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2414 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2415 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2416 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2417 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2418 comparison.
2419
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002420 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2421 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2422 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2423 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002424 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002425
2426 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002427
2428 and ::
2429
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002430 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2431
2432 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2433 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2434 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2435 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2436
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002437 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2438 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2439 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2440 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2441 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2442
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002443 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2444 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002445 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2446 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002447
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002448Library
2449-------
2450
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002451- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2452 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2453
2454- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2455 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2456 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2457 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2458 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2459 See PEP 307 for details.
2460
2461- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2462 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2463
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002464- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2465 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002466 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002467 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2468 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002469 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002470
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002471- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2472 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2473
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002474- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2475 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2476 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2477
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002478- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2479
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002480- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2481 exception.
2482
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002483- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2484 class.
2485
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002486- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2487 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2488 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2489
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002490- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2491 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2492
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002493- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002494 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2495 See SF bug #659228.
2496
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002497- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2498 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2499 See SF patch #651082.
2500
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002501- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002502
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002503- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2504 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2505
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002506- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002507 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002508
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002509- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2510 DOS paths from other platforms.
2511
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002512Tools/Demos
2513-----------
2514
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002515- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2516 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2517 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2518 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2519 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2520 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2521 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2522 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2523 example:
2524
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002525 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2526 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002527
2528 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2529
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002530
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002531Build
2532-----
2533
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002534- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2535 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2536 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002537 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2538
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002539 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2540
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002541- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2542 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2543 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2544 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2545 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2546 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2547 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2548 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2549 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2550
2551- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2552 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2553 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2554 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2555
2556- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2557 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2558
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002559C API
2560-----
2561
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002562- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2563 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002564
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002565- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2566 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2567 tp_as_number pointer.
2568
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002569- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2570 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2571 (SF #681367)
2572
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002573- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2574 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2575 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2576 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002577
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002578Tests
2579-----
2580
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002581- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002582 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2583 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2584 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2585 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2586 pydoc.)
2587
2588- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2589
2590- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002591
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002592Windows
2593-------
2594
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002595- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2596 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2597 time).
2598
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002599- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2600 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2601
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002602- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2603 release without strong cryptography.
2604
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002605- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002606 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002607
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002608- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2609 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2610
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002611Mac
2612---
2613
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002614- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2615 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002616
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002617- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2618 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2619 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002620
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002621- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2622 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002623
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002624- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2625 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2626 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2627 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002628
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002629- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002630 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2631 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2632 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002633
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002634
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002635What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002636=================================
2637
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002638*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002639
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002640Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002641--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002642
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002643- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2644
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002645- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2646 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002647 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002648 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002649 a different meaning than before.
2650
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002651- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002652 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002653 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002654
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002655- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002656 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002657 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002658
2659- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2660 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2661 and deallocation.
2662
2663- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2664 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2665
2666- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2667 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2668 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2669 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2670 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2671
2672- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2673 now detected by the garbage collector.
2674
2675- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2676 [SF bug 519621]
2677
2678- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2679 identifier.
2680
2681- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2682 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2683 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2684 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2685 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2686 [SF bug 563060]
2687
2688- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2689 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2690 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2691 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2692 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2693
2694- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2695 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2696 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2697
2698- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2699
2700- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2701 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2702 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2703 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2704 state of the slots would be lost.)
2705
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002706Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002707-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002708
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002709- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002710 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2711 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2712 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2713 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002714 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2715 Jython 2.1.
2716
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002717- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002718 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002719 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2720 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2721 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2722 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2723 these, see PEP 302.
2724
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002725- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2726 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2727 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2728
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002729- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2730 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2731 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2732
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002733- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2734 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2735 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2736
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002737- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2738 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2739 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2740 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2741 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2742 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2743 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2744 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2745 releases or implementations.
2746
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002747- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002748 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2749 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002750
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002751- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2752 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2753
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002754- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2755 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2756 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2757
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002758- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2759 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2760
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002761- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2762 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002763 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2764 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002765
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002766- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2767 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2768 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2769 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2770 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2771
2772 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2773 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2774 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2775 pattern.
2776
2777 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2778 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2779 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2780 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2781
2782 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2783 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2784 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2785 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2786 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2787 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2788
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002789- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2790 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2791 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2792 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2793 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2794 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2795 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2796 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002797
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002798- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2799 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2800 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2801 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2802 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002803 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2804 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2805 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2806 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2807 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2808 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2809 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002810
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002811- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2812 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2813
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002814- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2815 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2816 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2817 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2818 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2819 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2820 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2821 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2822 to Zack Weinberg!
2823
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002824- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2825 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2826 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2827 type. This has been fixed now.
2828
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002829- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2830 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2831 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2832
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002833- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2834 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2835 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2836 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2837 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2838 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2839 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2840 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002841 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002842
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002843- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2844 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2845 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002846
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002847- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2848 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2849 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2850 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2851 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2852 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2853 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2854 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002855 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002856 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2857 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2858
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002859- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2860 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2861 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2862 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2863 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2864 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2865 this.)
2866
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002867- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2868 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002869 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002870 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002871 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2872 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002873 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2874 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002875
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002876- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2877 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2878 currently running.
2879
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002880- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2881 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2882 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2883 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2884
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002885- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2886 as directory names.
2887
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002888- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2889 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2890
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002891- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2892 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2893
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002894- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002895 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2896 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002897
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002898- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2899 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2900 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2901 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2902 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2903
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002904- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2905 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2906 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2907 removed.
2908
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002909- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2910 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2911 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2912
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002913- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2914 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2915 to __debug__.
2916
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002917- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2918 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2919 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2920
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002921- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2922 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2923 deprecated now.
2924
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002925- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2926 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2927 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002928
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002929- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2930 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2931 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2932 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2933 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002934
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002935- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2936 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2937
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002938- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2939 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2940 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002941 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002942 is backward compatible.
2943
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002944- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2945 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2946 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2947 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2948 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2949
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002950- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2951 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2952 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2953 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2954 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2955 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002956
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002957- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2958 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2959
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002960- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2961 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2962
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002963- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2964 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2965 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2966 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2967 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2968
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002969- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2970 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2971 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2972
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002973- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002974 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2975
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002976- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2977 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2978 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002979
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002980- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2981 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2982
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002983- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2984 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2985 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2986
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002987- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2988
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002989Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002991
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002992- Added three operators to the operator module:
2993 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2994 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2995 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2996
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002997- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2998
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002999- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3000 archives.
3001
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003002- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3003 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3004 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3005
3006 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3007
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003008- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3009 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3010 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003011 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003012
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003013- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3014 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3015 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3016 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003017 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3018 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3019 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3020 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003021
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003022- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3023 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003024
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003025- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3026
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003027- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3028 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3029
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003030- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3031 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3032 supported.
3033
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003034- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3035
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003036- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3037 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003038
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003039- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3040 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3041
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003042- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3043
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003044- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3045 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3046
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003047- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3048 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3049 functions but callable type objects.
3050
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003051- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003052 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003053 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003054
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003055- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3056 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003057
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003058- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3059 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003060
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003061- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3062 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3063 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3064 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3065
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003066- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3067 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003068
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003069- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3070 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3071 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3072 and __imul__.
3073
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003074- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003075 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3076 is called.
3077
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003078- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3079 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3080 interpreter was compiled.
3081
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003082- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3083 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3084 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003085 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003086 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3087 1, not 2.
3088
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003089- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3090 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3091 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3092 limit.
3093
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003094- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3095 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3096 bug #623464.
3097
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003098- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3099 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3100 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3101 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3102
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003103Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003104-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003105
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003106- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3107
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003108- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3109 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3110 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3111 with Python 2.3a2.
3112
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003113- os.path exposes getctime.
3114
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003115- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003116 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003117 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003118 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003119 unit tests of floating point results.
3120
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003121- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3122 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3123 has been increased.
3124
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003125- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3126 executed.
3127
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003128- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3129 postinstallation script.
3130
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003131- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3132 test the current module.
3133
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003134- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003135 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3136 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3137 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3138 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3139
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003140- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003141 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003142 Ward's Optik package.
3143
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003144- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3145 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3146 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3147 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3148
3149- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3150 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003151 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003152
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003153- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3154 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3155 shelf are binary pickles.
3156
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003157- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3158 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3159
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003160- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3161 modules are iterators now.
3162
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003163- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3164 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3165 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3166 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3167 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3168 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003169
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003170- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3171 with their entity value.
3172
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003173- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3174
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003175- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3176 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003177
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003178- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3179 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003180 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003181
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003182- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3183 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3184 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3185 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3186 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3187 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3188 main():
3189
3190 import locale
3191 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3192
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003193- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3194 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3195
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003196- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3197 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3198 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3199 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3200 to the new standard.
3201
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003202- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3203 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3204 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3205 an extension to the database.
3206
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003207- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3208 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3209 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3210 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003211 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003212
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003213- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003214 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003215
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003216- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3217 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3218 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3219 bounded integers.
3220
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003221- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3222 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3223 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3224 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3225 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3226 in existence.
3227
3228 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3229 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3230 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3231 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3232 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3233 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3234
3235 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3236 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3237 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3238 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3239
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003240- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3241 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3242 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3243
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003244- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3245
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003246- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3247 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3248 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3249 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3250
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003251- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3252 argument.
3253
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003254- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3255 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3256 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3257 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3258 [SF patch 560794].
3259
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003260- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3261 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3262 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003263 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3264 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3265 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003266
3267- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3268 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003269
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003270- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3271 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3272 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3273 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003274
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003275- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3276 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3277 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3278 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3279 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3280
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003281- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003282
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003283- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3284
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003285- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3286 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3287 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3288 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3289 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3290 identical to None.
3291
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003292- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3293 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3294 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3295 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3296 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3297 results now.
3298
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003299- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3300 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3301
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003302- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3303 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3304 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3305 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3306 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3307 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3308 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3309 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3310
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003311- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3312
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003313- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3314 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3315
3316- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3317 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3318 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3319 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3320 and other systems.
3321
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003322- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3323 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3324 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3325 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 +00003326 work well with these.
3327
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003328- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3329
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003330- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003331 connections.
3332
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003333- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3334 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3335 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3336
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003337- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3338 sets
3339
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003340- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3341 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3342 name.
3343
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003344- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3345 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3346 passed in.
3347
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003348- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003349 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003350 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3351 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003352
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003353- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3354
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003355- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3356
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003357- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3358 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3359 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3360
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003361- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3362 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3363 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3364 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003365 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003366
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003367- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003368 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003369 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003370
3371- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3372 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3373 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3374
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003375- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003376 the value of its expression argument.
3377
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003378- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3379 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3380 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3381
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003382- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3383 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3384 skipstone browser was included.
3385
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003386- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3387 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3388
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003389Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003390-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003391
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003392- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3393 names in addition to accepting file names.
3394
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003395- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3396 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3397 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3398 still used and useful.)
3399
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003400- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3401 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3402 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3403 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003404
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003405- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3406 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3407 the generated binary.
3408
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003409Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003411
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003412- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3413
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003414- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3415 except in the hands of experts.
3416
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003417- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003418 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3419 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3420 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003421
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003422- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3423 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3424 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3425 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3426 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3427 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3428 builds.
3429
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003430- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3431 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3432 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3433 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3434 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3435 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3436 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3437 new type.
3438
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003439- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003440
3441 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3442 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3443 positive infinities.
3444
3445 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3446 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3447 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3448 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3449 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3450 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3451 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3452
3453 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3454
3455 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3456
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003457- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3458 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3459 size of the executable.
3460
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003461- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3462 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3463 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3464 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003465
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003466- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3467
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003468- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3469 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3470 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003471
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003472- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3473 well as Unix.
3474
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003475- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3476 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3477 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3478 modules in the README file for details.
3479
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003480C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003481-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003482
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003483- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3484 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003485 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003486 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003487 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003488
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003489- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3490 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3491 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3492 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3493 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3494 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003495 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003496 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3497 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3498 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3499 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3500 aligned.)
3501
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003502- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3503 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3504 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3505
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003506- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3507 level.
3508
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003509- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3510 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3511 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3512 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3513 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3514
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003515- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3516 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3517 code.
3518
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003519- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3520 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3521 adjusting for negative indices.
3522
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003523- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3524 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3525 object.
3526
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003527- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3528 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3529 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3530
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003531- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3532 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003533
3534- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3535
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003536- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3537 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3538 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3539 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3540
3541- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3542
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003543- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003544
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003545- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003546 without going through the buffer API.
3547
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003548- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003549
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003550- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3551 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3552 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3553 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3554
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003555- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3556 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3557
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003558- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003559 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3560
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003561New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003563
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003564- OpenVMS is now supported.
3565
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003566- AtheOS is now supported.
3567
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003568- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3569
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003570- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3571
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003572Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573-----
3574
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003575- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3576 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3577 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003578
3579Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003580-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003581
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003582- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3583 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3584 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3585 bugs.
3586 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003587 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003588 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3589 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003590 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003591
3592- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003593 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003594
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003595- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3596 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3597
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003598- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3599 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003600 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003601 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3602
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003603- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3604 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3605 use files" uninstall option).
3606
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003607- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3608
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003609- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3610 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3611
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003612- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3613 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3614 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3615
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003616- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3617 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3618 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3619 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3620 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003621 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3622 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3623 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003624
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003625- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003626 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003627 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3628 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3629 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3630 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3631 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3632 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3633 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3634 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3635 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3636 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3637 work around.
3638
3639- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3640 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3641 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3642 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3643 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3644 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3645 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3646 specified with O_CREAT too).
3647
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003648Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649----
3650
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003651- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003652
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003653- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3654 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3655 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3656
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003657- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3658 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3659 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3660
3661- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3662 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3663 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3664 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3665 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3666 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3667 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3668 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003669
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003670- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3671 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3672 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003673
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003674- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3675 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3676 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3677 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3678 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003679
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003680- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3681 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3682 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003683
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003684- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3685 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003686
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003687- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3688 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3689 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3690 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3691 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003692
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003693- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3694 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3695 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3696
3697- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3698 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3699 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003700
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003701- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3702 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3703 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3704 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003705 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003706
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003707- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3708 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003709
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003710- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3711 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003712
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003713- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003714 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003715 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3716 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003717
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003718
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003719What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003720===============================
3721
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3723
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003724Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003726
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003727- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3728 with a custom metaclass.
3729
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003730Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003731-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003732
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003733- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3734 are proxies.
3735
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003736Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003738
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003739- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3740 very short strings.
3741
3742- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3743 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3744 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3745 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3746 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3747
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003748Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003750
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003751- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3752 close or delete time).
3753
3754- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3755 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3756
3757- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3758
3759- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003760 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003761
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003762Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003764
3765Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003767
3768C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003769-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003770
3771New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003773
3774Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003775-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003776
3777Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003778-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003779
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003780- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3781
3782- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3783 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3784
3785- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3786 deleted at process exit time.
3787
3788- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3789 in backslash.
3790
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003791Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003793
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003794- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3795 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3796 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3797
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003798
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003799What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003800===========================
3801
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3803
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003804Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003806
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003807- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3808 been extensively updated. See
3809
3810 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3811
3812 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3813
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003814- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3815 deleted!
3816
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003817- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3818 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3819 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3820 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3821 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3822
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003823- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3824
3825 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3826 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3827
3828 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3829 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3830 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3831 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3832 supported anyway.
3833
3834 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3835 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3836
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003837- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3838 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3839 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3840 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3841 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003842
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003843- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3844 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3845 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3846
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003847Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003848-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003849
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003850- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3851 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3852 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3853 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3854 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3855 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003856 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3857 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3858 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3859 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003860
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003861- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3862 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3863 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3864
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003865Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003867
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003868- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3869
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003870Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003872
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003873- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3874 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3875 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3876 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3877 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3878 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3879
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003880- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3881
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003882- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3883
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003884- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3885
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003886- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3887 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3888 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3889
3890- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3891
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003892Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003894
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003895- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3896 off a search on Google.
3897
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003898Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003899-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003900
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003901- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3902 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3903 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3904 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3905 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3906 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3907 other platforms should do likewise.
3908
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003909- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3910 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3911 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3912
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003913C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003915
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003916- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3917 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3918 producing key-value pairs.
3919
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003920- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003921 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003922 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3923 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3924 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3925 previously went unchallenged.
3926
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003927New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003929
3930Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003931-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003932
3933Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003935
3936Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003937----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003938
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003939- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3940 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003941
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003942- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3943 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3944 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3945 home.
3946
3947
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003948What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003949===========================
3950
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3952
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003953Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003954--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003955
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003956- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3957 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003958
3959 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003960 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003961
3962 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3963 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003964 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003965 This needs to be documented.
3966
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003967- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3968 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3969
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003970- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3971 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3972 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3973
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003974- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3975 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3976
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003977- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3978 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3979 class forbids it).
3980
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003981- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3982 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3983 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3984
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003985- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3986
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003987Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003988-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003989
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003990- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3991 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003992 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003993
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003994- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3995 (like 1 + '').
3996
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003997Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003998-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003999
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004000- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4001 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4002 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4003 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004004 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004005 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4006
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004007- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4008 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4009 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4010 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4011
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004012- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4013 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004014 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4015 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4016 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004017
4018- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4019 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004020
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004021- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4022 bytes on its input.
4023
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004024Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004025-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004026
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004027- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004028 convenience function.
4029
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004030- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4031 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4032 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004033 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4034 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4035 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4036 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4037 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4038 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004039
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004040- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4041 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4042 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4043 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4044
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004045- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4046 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4047 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4048
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004049- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4050 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4051 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4052 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4053
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004054- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4055 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004057 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4058 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4059 new -l and -e options.
4060
4061- statcache is now deprecated.
4062
4063- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4064 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004066 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4067 time properly taken into account.
4068
4069- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4070 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4071 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4072 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4073
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004074Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004076
4077Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004078-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004079
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004080- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4081 is built with libdb3 if available.
4082
4083- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4084
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004085C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004087
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004088- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4089 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4090 PySequence_Size().
4091
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004092- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4093
4094- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4095 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4096 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4097
4098- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4099 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4100
4101- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4102 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4103
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004104New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004105-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004106
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004107- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4108 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4109
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004110- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4111 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4112
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004113- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4114
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004115Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004117
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004118- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4119 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4120
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004121Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004123
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004124Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004126
4127- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4128 removed completely in the next release.
4129
4130- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4131 OSX.
4132
4133- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4134 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4135
4136- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4137
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004138
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004139What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004140===========================
4141
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4143
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004144Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004146
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004147- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004148 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004149 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004150 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4151 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004152 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4153 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004154 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4155 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004156
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004157- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4158 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4159
4160- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4161 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4162
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004163Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004165
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004166- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4167 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4168 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4169 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4170 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4171 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4172 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4173 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4174
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004175- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4176 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4177 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4178 example).
4179
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004180- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004181 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004182 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004183 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004184
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004185- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4186 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4187 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004188 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004189
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004190- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4191 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4192 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4193 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4194 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4195 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4196
4197 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4198
4199 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4200
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004201Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004202-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004203
4204- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4205
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004206- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4207
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004208- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4209 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004210
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004211- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4212 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4213 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4214 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4215 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4216 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004217 attributes.
4218
4219- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4220 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4221 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004222
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004223- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4224 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4225 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004226
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004227- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4228 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4229 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004230 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4231 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4232
4233- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4234 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004235
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004236Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004237-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004238
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004239- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4240 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4241
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004242- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4243 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4244 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4245 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4246
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004247- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4248 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4249 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4250 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4251
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004252 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4253 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4254 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4255 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4256 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4257 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4258 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4259 without losing information).
4260
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004261- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004262 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4263 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4264 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4265 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4266 module).
4267
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004268 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004269 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4270 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4271 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4272 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004273
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004274- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004275 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4276 encoding.
4277
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004278- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4279 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4280
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004281- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004282 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4283
4284- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4285 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4286 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4287 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4288
4289- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4290
4291- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4292 ON, and OFF.
4293
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004294- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4295 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4296
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004297Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004298-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004299
4300- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4301 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4302 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004303
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004304- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4305 been added: -X and -E.
4306
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004307Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004309
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004310- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4311 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4312
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004313C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004314-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004315
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004316- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4317 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4318 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4319 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4320 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4321
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004322- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4323 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4324 as long) arguments.
4325
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004326- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4327 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4328 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4329 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4330 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4331 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4332
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004333- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4334 input.
4335
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004336New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004338
4339Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004340-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004341
4342Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004344
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004345- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4346 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4347 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4348
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004349- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4350 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4351 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004352 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004353
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004354 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4355 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4356 import signal
4357 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004358
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004360 while 1:
4361 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004362 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004363 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4364 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4365 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4366 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004367
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004368
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004369What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4370===========================
4371
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004372*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4373
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004374Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004376
4377- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4378 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4379 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4380
4381- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4382 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4383 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4384 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4385 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4386 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4387 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004388
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004389- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004390 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004391 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4392 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4393 associate a docstring with a property.
4394
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004395- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4396 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4397 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4398 other built-in object types.
4399
4400- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4401 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4402 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4403 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4404 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4405
4406- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4407 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4408
4409- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4410 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004411 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004412 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4413 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4414 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4415 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4416 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4417
4418- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4419 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4420 class.
4421
4422- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4423 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4424 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4425 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4426
4427- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4428 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4429 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4430 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4431
4432- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4433 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4434
4435- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4436 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4437 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4438 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4439 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004440 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004441 with the same value as s.
4442
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004443- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4444
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004445Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004446----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004447
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004448- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4449
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004450- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4451 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4452 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4453 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4454 objects.
4455
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004456- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4457 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004458 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4459 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4460
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004461- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4462 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4463 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4464
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004465Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004467
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004468- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4469 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4470 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4471 by the instances.
4472
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004473- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4474 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4475 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4476
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004477- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4478 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4479 before the entire comparison is complete.
4480
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004481- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4482 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4483 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4484
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004485- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4486 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4487 getwriter().
4488
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004489- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4490 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4491
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004492- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004493 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4494 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4495
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004496- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4497 iterable object.
4498
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004499- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4500 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004501
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004502- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4503 authentication.
4504
4505- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4506 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004507
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004508- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004509 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4510 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4511 a sample driver.)
4512
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004513Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004515
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004516- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4517 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4518 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4519 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4520 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4521 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4522 kernel has large file support.
4523
4524- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4525 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4526 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4527 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4528 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4529
4530- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4531 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4532 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4533
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004534C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004536
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004537- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4538 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4539
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004540New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004541-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004542
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004543- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4544 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4545
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004546Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004547-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004548
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004549- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4550 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4551 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4552 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4553 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4554
4555- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4556 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4557 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4558 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4559
4560- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4561 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4562
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004563Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004565
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004566- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004567 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4568 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004569
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004570
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004571What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4572===========================
4573
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4575
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004576Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004577----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004578
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004579- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4580 big to represent as a C double.
4581
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004582- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4583 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4584 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4585 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4586 restriction).
4587
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004588- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4589 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4590 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4591 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4592 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4593
4594 >>> dir([])
4595 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4596 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4597 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4598 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4599 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4600 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4601 'reverse', 'sort']
4602
4603 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4604
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004605- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004606 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4607 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4608 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4609 OverflowError exception.
4610
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004611- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004612 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004613 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4614 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4615 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4616 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4617 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004618 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4620 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4621
4622 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4623 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4624 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4625 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004626
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004627- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004628 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4629 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4630 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4631 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4632 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4633 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4634 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4635 once it is created.
4636
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004637- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4638 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4639 (key, value) pairs.
4640
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004641- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004642 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4643 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4644
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004645- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4646 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4647 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4648 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4649 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004650
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004651- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004652 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4653 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4654
4655 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4656
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004657- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004658 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4659
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004660Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004661-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004662
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004663- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004664 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4665 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004666
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004667- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4668 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4669 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4670 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4671 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4672 in this area anymore).
4673
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004674- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4675 threading.Timer.
4676
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004677- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4678 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4679
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004680- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004681 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4682
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004683- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004684 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4685 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4686 converted to Python longs.
4687
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004688- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004689 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4690
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004691- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4692 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4693 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4694
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004695Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004696-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004697
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004698- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4699 division operators as per PEP 238.
4700
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004701Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004702-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004703
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004704- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4705 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4706 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4707 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4708
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004709C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004711
4712- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004713
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004714- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4715 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004716 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004717
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004718 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4719 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004720 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004721 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004722
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004723- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004724 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4725 module:
4726
4727 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004728
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004729 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4730 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004731
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004732 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4733 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004734
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004735 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4736
4737 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4738
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004739- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004740 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4741 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4742 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004743
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004744New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004745-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004746
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004747- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4748 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4749 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4750 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4751 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004752
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004753Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004755
4756Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004757-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004758
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004759- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4760 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4761 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4762 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004763 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4764 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4765 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4766 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4767 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004768
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004769- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004770 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4771
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004772
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004773What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4774===========================
4775
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004776*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4777
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004778Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004780
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004781- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4782 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4783
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004784- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4785 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4786 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004787
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004788- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4789 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4790 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4791 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004792
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004793- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4794
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004795- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004796
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004797Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004798-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004799
4800- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004801 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004802 the module docstring for details.
4803
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004804Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004805-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004806
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004807- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004808 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4809 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4810 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004811
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004812- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4813 Nick Mathewson.
4814
4815Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004817
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004818- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4819 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4820 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4821 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4822 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4823 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4824 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4825 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4826
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004827- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4828 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4829 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4830 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4831
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004832- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4833 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4834 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4835 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4836 come a long way).
4837
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004838- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4839 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4840 write filters for these warnings).
4841
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004842- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4843 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4844 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4845 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4846 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4847
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004848- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4849 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4850 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4851 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4852 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4853 older distribution.
4854
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004855Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004856-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004857
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004858- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4859 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004860 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004861
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004862- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4863 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4864 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4865
4866- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4867
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004868- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4869
4870- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4871
4872- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4873
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004875
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004876- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4877
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004878New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004880
4881C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004882-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004883
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004884- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4885 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4886 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4887 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4888 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4889 against buffer overruns.
4890
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004891- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004892 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4893 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004894 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4895 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4896 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4897
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004898- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4899 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4900 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4901 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4902 deprecated.
4903
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004904Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004905-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004906
4907- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4908 relevant is found.
4909
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004910
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004911What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004912===========================
4913
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004914*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4915
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004916Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004917----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004918
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004919- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4920 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4921 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4922 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4923 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4924 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4925 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4926 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004927 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004928 repaired.
4929
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004930- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004931 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004932 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4933 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4934 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4935 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4936 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4937 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4938 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4939 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4940
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004941- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4942 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4943 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4944 leading BMO character).
4945
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004946- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4947 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4948 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4949
4950 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4951 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4952 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004953
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004954 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4955 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4956 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4957 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4958 for various simple to use conversions.
4959
4960 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4961 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4962
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004963 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4964 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4965 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4966 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4967 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4968 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4969 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4970 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4971 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4972 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4973 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4974 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4975 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4976 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4977 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004978
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004979- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4980 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4981 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004982 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004983 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004984
4985 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004986 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4987 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4988 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4989 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4990 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004991 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4992 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004993
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004994 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4995 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4996 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004997 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004998
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004999- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5000 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5001 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5002 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5003 floating arithmetic,
5004
5005 x = 9007199254740992.0
5006 print long(x)
5007
5008 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5009 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5010 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5011 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5012 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5013 functions are of good quality).
5014
5015 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5016 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5017 algorithms to break.
5018
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005019- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5020 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5021 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5022 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5023 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5024 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5025 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5026 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5027 order.
5028
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005029- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5030 operation along the most common code paths.
5031
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005032- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5033 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5034
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005035- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5036 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5037 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5038 {}.update(UserDict())
5039
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005040- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5041 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5042 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5043 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5044 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5045 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5046 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5047 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5048
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005049- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005050 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005052 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005053 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5054 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005055 join() method of strings
5056 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005057 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5058 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005060 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005061
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005062- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5063 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5064
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005065- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5066 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5067
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005068- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5069 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5070 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5071 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5072
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005073- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5074 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005075 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005076 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5077 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005078
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005079- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5080
5081
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005082Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005083-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005084
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005085- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005086 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005087 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5088 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5089
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005090- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5091 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5092
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005093- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5094 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5095 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5096 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5097
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005098- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5099 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5100 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5101
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005102- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5103
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005104- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5105
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005106- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5107 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5108 that are still imported into string.py).
5109
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005110- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5111
5112- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5113 Now it does.
5114
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005115- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5116
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005117- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5118 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5119 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5120 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5121 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005122 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5123 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005124
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005125- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5126 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5127 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5128 'help(object)'.
5129
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005130Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005132
5133- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005134 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005135 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5136 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5137
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005138- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005139 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5140 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005141
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005142C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005143-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005144
5145- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5146 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005147
5148----
5149
5150**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**